Hawaiians offer a bittersweet aloha to a much-loved old bakery.
Love’s Bakery will close in late March, after the COVID-19 pandemic brought surgery to its knees, SFGate reports.
The bakery has been spreading love since 1851, setting fire to its ovens for the first time more than a century before Hawaii became the 50th state.
The Honolulu mainstay employs 231 people – all of whom will lose their jobs – and normally distributes about 400,000 loaves of bread to 1,800 customers every week, the website reports.
Demand for bread fell sharply during the pandemic, with hotels and restaurants closing, and increased local competition reportedly cut a big cut from Love’s dough.
Loves said it was “seriously overdue” on rent payments, spending all of the $ 2.8 million it received on federal COVID-19 loans to keep payroll up, according to the site.
“We have worked hard to cut costs, maintain our market share and overcome our operational problems, but under the current business environment we are no longer able to continue our business,” the company said in a statement to the media. . .
Hawaii’s geographic isolation also contributed to the bakery’s pandemic woes.
“COVID-19 has also impacted many of our mainland suppliers, causing delays in ingredients and replacement parts for our obsolete bakery equipment,” said the Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) letter and the Hawaii Dislocated Workers Act Notice. “With the decline in revenues and the rising costs of running a bakery, we have made the difficult decision to close our business as a faltering business.”
When Love’s Bakery kneaded its first bread 170 years ago, King Kamehameha III sat on the Hawaiian throne.
Love’s homegrown business boomed during the World Wars, and by 1943, the company was baking bread around the clock in a 144-foot oven that stuck out 8,000 loaves of bread per hour, SF Gate said.
By 1945, it reportedly flew the bread to neighboring islands by charter plane, as Hawaii’s population grew rapidly.
Businesses across the country and around the world have been struggling to make bread since the pandemic stopped trading. According to a survey, more than half of US companies forced to close will never reopen.