When the tourists stopped coming to the North Shore in late March, Ted’s Bakery in Haleiwa carried on, continuing to whip out thousands of its acclaimed chocolate haupia cream pies and other desserts while riding out the pandemic.
The family company had to close the retail side of its operation, but the bakery has been surviving on its vast wholesale pie market that supplies the entire state, said owner Ted Nakamura.
“If we didn’t have wholesale, we’d be in a bad situation,” said Nakamura. “We laid off 35 workers and kept 35.”
Nakamura says he’s semi-retired, with his two eldest daughters Torey and Caylen overseeing the operation; however, his fingers are still very much in the pie. “I fix stuff, maintain the place, keep everything going right,” he said.
Nakamura also envisions a bigger bakery with updated machinery for the next generation — it’s still operating from a building constructed in 1956 that started out as the Sunset Beach Store.
Plans would involve relocating the bakery closer to Honolulu’s center of commerce and expanding the line of products with even more automation. Currently half the production is done manually, and the other half with machines in a facility that was last upgraded over 20 years ago.
“We can produce a lot more, but we’ve reached our maximum,” he added. “I like to make things easier, better and faster. But we have to wait and see how things go when we get back to business and open up” post-pandemic.
Family business
Nakamura was 28 years old when he started Ted’s Bakery in 1987 inside the Sunset Beach Store that his parents Takemitsu and Eva Nakamura opened 31 years earlier. It was built on 3 acres of land purchased by Ted’s grandfather, Torojiro Nakamura, who immigrated in 1906 from Japan and became a farmer.
Ted’s brother Glenn Nakamura, now retired, took over the management of the convenience store in 1985 and soon asked Ted to start baking doughnuts and other pastries. With a culinary school degree, Ted had worked as a pastry chef at various hotels by then. Gradually the store’s other merchandise dwindled and the pies emerged as the main attraction; it became known more as Ted’s Bakery in the late 1990s, though he doesn’t remember when exactly, he said.
In the beginning, pies weren’t part of the bakery’s repertoire, but he started making macadamia nut cream pies at the request of Jameson’s by the Sea (now closed), and later for other Haleiwa restaurants; the extras were sold in the bakery. Other flavors of cream pies followed — blueberry, strawberry, chocolate macadamia nut — until he hit upon the quintessential combination of chocolate and haupia (coconut) around 1996.
“I started to experiment using (leftover) haupia; we would make haupia coconut cake — to this day it is one of our top-selling cakes. At that time, I put half chocolate cream and half haupia cream. As a test, we gave it out to our employees, and they said I should sell it.”
“That one sold well,” he said, a marked understatement, as this pie constitutes half the 250,000 pies sold per year. All his recipes, sweet and savory, were developed by trial and error. “I asked the employees their opinion. … Over the years we just had to experiment, that’s how I did everything.”
He’s unable to explain his bestseller’s long-lasting popularity. Among its numerable awards, the chocolate haupia pie has won the Star-Advertiser’s Hawaii’s Best award for the last four years.
One factor oft-mentioned by fans is the flakiness of its crust. Nakamura’s secret? “Bake ‘em good, till it’s golden brown, not white,” before adding the filling, so it stays crisp even after four days. Another factor is high-quality ingredients: “Ted’s Bakery has always used 100% butter, cream and vanilla.”
Pie craze
In 1998 the bakery started the uncommon practice of delivery to Honolulu offices downtown, Nakamura said. It began when a customer called to ask, if she ordered a certain quantity of pies, would the bakery deliver it free across the island?
That gesture of aloha launched a million-dollar boom. The bakery grossed about $500,000 from May to December that year, and the projected income for the fiscal year 1998-1999 was $1 million, Glenn Nakamura told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1999.
Office workers wanted pies delivered on a Friday for weekend get-togethers, storing them in the employees’ lunch refrigerators till the end of the day. Word-of-mouth spread even faster thanks to the fax machine, and many of the orders came in by fax.
“I didn’t expect to sell so many in one day — 600 pies in one day!” Nakamura exclaimed. They added a Wednesday delivery, hoping to make the Friday order more manageable, but the mid-week orders became just as plenteous.
By then, supermarkets and chain stores had gotten wind of the Ted’s pie craze and the wholesale business took off; now it includes prepacked slices for convenience.
In the midst of all this, a few years before 2000, the store started offering breakfast, lunch and dinner plates for takeout, providing about 20 tables scattered outdoors. Daughter Torey Nakamura, director of operations, said surfing had turned Haleiwa into a hot spot for tourists and locals, and “my dad saw serving hot food would help the community.”
Torey trained to take over accounting matters when her Uncle Glenn retired in 2016. Younger sister Caylen joined the team a year later as food safety manager after graduating from pastry school. Before the March lockdown, the store did a brisk business selling food as well as merchandise like shirts and mugs, Caylen said.
Torey added, “All of sudden, we heard about COVID and we were instructed to remove our tables. The North Shore became a ghost town, it was kinda scary.”
She and her sister, both in their mid-20s, grew up helping out after school and on weekends, and each is glad to have the other around for support; they have a younger sister who’s in college and undecided about her career.
Torey said the company’s wholesale business was definitely impacted in the earlier months of the pandemic. It picked up at Thanksgiving, the busiest time of the year, when people scoop up the pumpkin haupia and pumpkin cream pies, she added.
Doing business in Hawaii is difficult and expensive, especially in COVID-19 times, Caylen said, but after watching their father put his soul into the company, they’re glad they can keep the business in the family. They’re trying not to change it too much, she said.
“For him, producing a quality product is one thing he values, and us, too, we still value that … making sure customers have the pies they grew up eating, something they remember, like the pie they had at their 10th birthday party,” she said.
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Ted’s Bakery
59-024 Kamehameha Hwy.
Info: 638-8207 or 638-5974; tedsbakery.com
The store is closed temporarily.
