Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2006

All you need is Love’s
John Wythe White

Before Hawai‘i’s bakery icon made powdered sugar doughnuts, buns and rolls, it made hardtack for whaling ships

A Slice of Island Life

To those of us who live in Hawai‘i, Love’s Bakery is as familiar as flip-flops and aloha shirts. The red-check­erboard logo has been a dominant presence in every Island mom-and-pop shop and supermarket for as long as we can remember. We go to Love’s thrift shops to get those tasty pow­dered sugar donuts at a discount. When we drive past the vacant lot on Kapahulu Avenue where the bakery used to be, our olfactory senses conjure up the pleasant aromas of fresh-baked bread. We can still smell it, yes we can.

There is nothing mom-and-pop about Love’s. It’s a big business. These days, the company bakes not only its own products packaged under its own name, it also bakes and packages other brands, such as Roman Meal, Wonder Bread, Holsum, Hostess, Home Pride, Little Debbies and Columbo. If you want to count the slices, that’s 110 loaves of bread per minute, about half-a-million pounds of bread per week. That’s a lot of—if you’ll pardon the expression—dough-re-mi.

Love’s Bakery has been around for 155 years, and for more than a hundred of those years it was owned and run by the direct descendants of the original founder. Its history, beginning three decades after the arrival of the first missionaries, parallels the development of contemporary Hawai‘i.

From Whalers to Forty-Niners

Missionary wives began baking bread in crude ovens, but it wasn’t very tasty. The flour they used, having traveled in casks from the Mainland via Cape Horn, was musty and sour, tainted by mold and bilge water. Some of it was so hard it had to be re-ground with a mortar, and some of it had to be sifted for weevils.

The first local wheat was grown in Makawao, Maui, in 1845. Within a few years, a steam-driven flour mill had been built in Honolulu, and flour was being exported to California, most no­tably to feed the gold-rushing Forty-Niners. Hawai‘i’s wheat industry was only temporary, however, eventually succumbing to competition from Cali­fornia and Oregon.

In 1851, master baker Robert Love ar­rived in Honolulu with his wife and three sons. A native of Glasgow, Scot­land, he was on his way to the gold fields of California on the Adirondack, an American ship on its way from Syd­ney. But when he envisioned the op­por­tunities that awaited in Hawai‘i, he decided to stay.

Less than a month after his arrival, the Ministry of the Interior granted Love’s application for a license to operate a bakery and sell its products. He wasn’t the first. An 1837 advertisement in the Sandwich Island Gazette, Ha­wai‘i’s first English-language newspaper, offered the services of “Ah Mow, Baker and Confectioner from China,” who was “happy to supply those who may patronise him with Bread of all descriptions … His bakery is at the House of the Chinese Watchmaker.”

In 1853, Love bought a parcel of land in the city of Honolulu, which was then bordered by Punchbowl, River and Beretania streets and the waterfront (which now demarcate most of what we call downtown Honolulu). The dirt streets were either dusty or mud­dy, and trees were mostly found only in private gardens and yards. Love purchased the property, on Nu‘u­anu Street near Pauahi Street, for $2,500, and built his first bakery there.

Love’s primary source of commerce in the early years was not the residential population, which was still largely Native Hawaiian and preferred to eat poi, but whaling ships. They carried bread that had become stale and hard during long voyages, and Love’s re­baked it for them. The bakery also made hard biscuits known as hardtack, pilot bread or navy bread. These products were baked to last over time, containing only flour, salt and water. Love’s later developed the Saloon Pilot, which is still available today. It contained shortening, and was considered a delicacy on ships.

Commercial yeast was not available until the late 1860s. Until then, the bakery raised its bread using potato yeast, saving a batch from each day’s setting to start the next day’s lot. Love’s first advertisement appeared in The Pacific Commercial Advertiser in 1856, offering 12 loaves of bread for a dollar. An ad appearing a year later of­fered 16 loaves for the same price. A Christmas ad touted “pound cake, seed cake, cup cake, New Year’s cake, Ma­deira cake, fruit cake, sponge cake, Swiss cake, and Lafayette cake—Plain and Ornamented!”

The King Lends a Hand

Robert Love died in 1858, at the age of 42. The bakery went to his three sons, who at the time were 22, 18 and 15. Three years later, the bakery was destroyed by fire. According to The Ad­ver­tiser, “His Majesty the King [Kame­ha­meha IV] and Prince Lot [later to become Kamehameha V] were both on the ground, and both worked as efficiently as any person there. All honor to their nobel [sic] conduct.”

An 1861 ad in The Advertiser read, “The fleet in the fall can be supplied with good pilot and navy bread at prices which it cannot be imported for, from San Francisco or anywhere else, and families will be able to find a constant and fresh assortment of Jenny Lind and nut cakes, sugar, butter, wa­ter, Boston and soda crackers. Having tested their quality, we can safely vouch for their goodness.”

The whaling industry peaked in 1859, when 249 ships arrived in Hono­lulu. But during the Civil War, the whaling fleet was almost entirely withdrawn from the Pacific to join the war effort. Shortly after the war ended, fossil oil and “illuminating gas” began to replace whale oil in lamps. By 1880, whaling was dead in the water, and Love’s was compelled to shift the bulk of its product line from sea biscuits to bread.

Robert Love Jr., the oldest son of the founder, died in 1883 at the age of 48. His widow, Fanny, inherited management of the bakery. A year later, it burn­ed to the ground for the second time, and once again royalty was present to fight the fire. According to The Ad­ver­tiser, “His Majesty the King [Kaläkaua] was on the scene of the action, and gave a willing hand.”

Fire might have struck the rebuilt bakery a third time but for a twist of fate. In 1899, Honolulu experienced an outbreak of bubonic plague. The area that was quarantined included the bakery. A controlled burning destroyed several affected buildings surrounding Love’s. Another burning went out of con­trol and destroyed 38 acres of Chi­na­town, leaving more than 4,000 residents homeless. The Love’s Bakery buildi­ngs were spared only because the area surrounding it had been previously laid bare, providing a fire break

“It’s Full of Calories”

Early in the 20th century, Love’s was baking 2,000 loaves of bread per day as Honolulu’s population swelled to almost 40,000. Contracts with the Army and Navy, as well as the territorial and city and county governments, helped to increase the bakery’s production and profits.

In 1917, a new bakery was built at the Nu‘uanu site, a steel and concrete building featuring a plate glass front that gave passersby a glimpse of the bread-making process. The Advertiser called it “the most complete and up-to-date bakery establishment ever seen in Honolulu and one which has few equals in cities on the Mainland.”

After World War I, during which Love’s observed “wheatless days” by producing two new brands, War Bread and Victory Bread (containing poi or rice flour), Honolulu’s population swell­ed again. A second Love’s Bakery was opened in Iwilei, adjacent to downtown, with a capacity of 50,000 loaves a day.

This new capacity was accompanied by a flurry of marketing, advertising, pub­lic relations and promotional ef­forts. A look at Love’s labels of the era reveals the variety of products offered as well as the company’s early at­tempts at what is known today as “product positioning.” In 1917, Love’s Cream Bread, Peerless Bread and Blue­bird Bread were Wrapped as Soon as Baked and delivered to consumers’ front doors much like the daily newspaper. The gingham/palaka motif was not only red, but also green, brown, blue and yellow. The wrappers of the five-cent Love’s Seaside Lunch and Love’s Moonlight Supper in 1925 contained the following promise: “It’s Full of Calories, It’s All Food.”

A Toothsome Loaf

Judging from the public relations literature of the time, Honoluluans were having a love affair with mechanized production, and home-baked bread was something to be avoided: “The mechanical weighing of ingredients … and cleverly controlled heat left no place for human fallibility. Bread­making is, first of all, governed by laws of chemistry. An amateur, work­ing by rule of thumb, sometimes hits the right combination and produces a loaf of bread that is delicious, wholesome and altogether satisfying. Often she doesn’t.

“People like clean, well-made baker’s bread because it is uniformly good. Love’s bread is uniformly good be­cause the new bakery has the best ma­chinery that money can buy. No hu­man hands and arms could ever blend the ingredients so perfectly and quickly.

“Verily, Love’s bread comes to you from golden grain to golden loaf un­touched by human hands—as clean, sweet and health-giving as the trade winds off the sea, the perfect, toothsome loaf, sanitarily wrapped, is delivered at the housewife’s door.”

Love’s advertisements and publicity boasted no treasured family recipes, no secret ingredients or closely guarded processes. Rather, they spoke of sanitary baking conditions and sterilized, modern equipment. By 1934, Love’s was baking thousands of loaves of bread every day, as well as cakes and pastries, delivering them by truck to stores and homes throughout O‘ahu. At this time, the company had 255 different products, each in its own unique package.

One of the most popular seasonal products was Love’s Hawaiian Fruit Cake, which came in a tin sporting a hula girl graphic and containing “le­mon and orange peel and citron from Italy, currants from Greece and cherries from France, which, when combined with our own tropical fruits, form a fruit cake so delicious that it is known and eaten in nearly every country in the world.”

In Time of War

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Honolulu residents be­gan to consume abnormal quantities of bread—because, according to Love’s publicity, everybody stayed on the job and ate sandwiches instead of going out for regular lunches. The requirements of the armed forces and the suddenly expanded civilian population made it impossible for Love’s to keep up with demand. A new facility was opened on Kapahulu Avenue in July 1943, and, when it was expanded five years later, it boasted what was then the world’s largest bread-baking oven, 144 feet long, capable of producing 8,000 loaves per hour.

In 1950, for the first time in the history of American food distribution, bread was flown by air freight on a chartered daily flight for the exclusive use of a bakery. Love’s had taken to the air in addition to barge shipping. Today, 95 percent of Love’s products are flown fresh to the Neighbor Is­lands. Only some cake varieties are barged.

Love’s Is All Around You

It took a century for ownership of Love’s Bakery to ultimately pass out of the Love family’s hands. In 1948, ITT Continental Baking Co., the makers of Wonder Bread, purchased the company.

In 1981, Love’s was sold again to the First Baking Co. of Japan. Today its official name is Daiichiya-Love’s Bakery. In 1990, the bakery moved from Kapa­hulu Avenue to its present site on Mid­dle Street, just off the H-1 freeway where, every morning, passing commut­ers enjoy the smell of fresh-baked bread.

The only other major bakery in Ha­wai‘i, Hawai‘i Baking Co., which had a market share equal to that of Love’s, suddenly went out of business in 2003. Almost overnight, Love’s was faced with a 30 percent increase in volume. Like yeast, the bakery rose to meet the challenge.

Love’s Bakery has operated under the reigns of six native monarchs, a provisional government, a republic, 12 ter­ritorial governors and six state governors. It has survived a series of fires, deaths, depressions, plagues, wars, shifting markets and fickle consumer trends. Yet, it is still going strong, currently producing 170 varieties of bread, 103 varieties of buns and rolls, and 105 varieties of cakes. Wherever you look in Hawai‘i, Love’s is all around.

JOHN WYTHE WHITE has written books and many magazine and newspaper stories about Hawai‘i. He is a frequent contributor to SPIRIT OF ALOHA.

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