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We’re home, we’re hungry and local entrepreneurs are not about to let us perish.
Products newly made in Hawaii range from oversized lilikoi cookies and custom snacks mixes crafted by a one-woman baking operation, to a pineapple-peach pie from a long-established Big Island sweet shop.
Think of it as sweet, salty, crunchy, chewy snack sustenance: a little relief from the relentless dismal news of the day.
Childhood memories of her mom’s cookies and the sweet/salty/crunchy snacks she often enjoyed at her grandparents’ house have inspired college junior Jenna Chai to create treats that would give islanders on the mainland a taste of home.
Before the pandemic, Chai said, she was enrolled at the University of San Francisco. “I really missed Hawaii snacks, so my mom would send up care packages.” That’s why the target customers of her new Pineapple Town Market are those who want to send care packages to students or, for that matter, anyone they miss.
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In July, while back at home taking virtual classes, Chai saw an opportunity to start an online company that let her pursue a love of baking and experimenting with recipes. She was pleased by the initial response, averaging about 500 orders per week; they’ve leveled off since at about 100 weekly.
She makes about 10 products based on family recipes she’s tweaked to spotlight local flavors, notably the use of macadamia nuts to replace ordinary peanuts. The Local Grindz Box, a $27 sampler of her three top sellers, contains Lilikoi Sugar Gem cookies, Island Style Party Mix and Furikake Mac Nut Okoshi (puffed rice).
The party mix includes her own favorites — arare and wonton chips, the things she loved to snack on at her grandparents house in Wahiawa. She stayed with them daily after school.
“Okoshi was something else I also grew up eating, since it is a popular Japanese snack and something that my grandparents both enjoyed,” she added.
When they were kids, Chai recalled, her brother and sister often picked out certain items from party mixes — one didn’t like pretzels, the other didn’t like Honeycomb cereal. She and her mom couldn’t find a mix that suited their particular cravings either.
That memory inspired her Pick Your Party Mix, which can be customized with a choice of five items. Chai offers such mix-ins as Cheetos, pretzels, Fritos, Crispix and Honeycomb cereals, furikake, mac nuts and Goldfish Crackers.
Her oversized lilikoi cookies were inspired by her mother’s sugar cookies, still warm from the oven. She added lilikoi to the recipe because she loves the flavor and her grandfather, Harry Endo, grows it in abundance. He’s an invaluable labor saver as he picks the fruit, and strains out the seeds and pulp for her. Endo also grows guava, among a bounty of fruits in his home garden.
”For my cookie of the month, I try to create a unique cookie that matches the weather/season. Since it is guava season and my grandpa has an abundance of guava, I decided to use the fresh fruit as a filling for a cookie.”
Her mother, Jodi Endo Chai, executive officer at the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, helps her prepare boxes for shipment with cute, yellow-themed packaging materials that make opening the box a treat in itself.
Pineapple Town Market is actually the second business Chai has launched; her first was Miya Swim, when she was just a ninth-grader at Punahou School. She designed, sewed and sold swimsuits online. The venture was successful, but she shut it down when she went away to college, majoring in Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
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