Hawaiians are offering bittersweet aloha to a longtime beloved bakery.
Love’s Bakery will close in late March, after the pandemic COVID-19 brought the operation to its knees, reports SFGate.
The bakery has spread love since 1851 and started its ovens for the first time more than a century before Hawaii became the 50th state.
The mainstay of Honolulu employs 231 people – who will lose their jobs – and normally distributes some 400,000 loaves of bread to 1,800 customers each week, the website reports.
Demand for bread fell during the pandemic, with hotels and restaurants closed. The increase in local competition would also have taken a large part of Love’s money.
Loves said he was “seriously delinquent” in paying the rent and spent all of the $ 2.8 million he received on federal relief loans COVID-19 to maintain the payroll, according to the website.
“We have been working diligently to cut expenses, maintain our market share and remedy our operational difficulties, however, in the current business environment, we are no longer able to continue operations,” the company said in a statement to the media, the vehicle said.
Hawaii’s geographic isolation also contributed to the bakery’s pandemic problems.
“COVID-19 has also impacted many of our continent suppliers, causing delays in ingredients and replacement parts for our aging bakery equipment,” states its Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification letter (WARN) and notification of the Hawaii Displaced Workers. “With the decline in revenue and the increase in expenses to keep a bakery up and running, we made the difficult decision to close operations as a faltering business.”
When the Bakery of Love kneaded their first loaf 170 years ago, King Kamehameha III was on the Hawaiian throne.
Love’s local operations expanded rapidly during the world wars, and by 1943, the company was baking bread 24 hours a day in a 44-meter-long oven that produced 8,000 loaves an hour, SF Gate said.
In 1945, he was transporting bread to neighboring islands on a chartered plane, while Hawaii’s population was growing rapidly.
Companies across the country and around the world have been struggling to make bread since the pandemic closed trade. More than half of American companies forced to close will never reopen, according to a study.