Hawaii’s Largest Food Product is Not What You Think

When you think about the food products of Hawaii one might consider Kona Coffee, Pineapples, rum or Macadamia nuts.  It’s hard to bring back a pineapple in your suitcase, but not so much for coffee or macadamia nuts or even mini bottles of rum, which I did.     But you’d be wrong on all accounts.   Today’s largest food product of Hawaii is one that does not disintegrate when dipped in coffee, is easy enough to package small and not break, easy to bring home and something everyone who went through the Hawaiian public school system from midcentury into the 21^st century knows about.    They’re mini butter shortbread cookies.

When I stepped off the plane at Lihue airport on the island of Kauai and into the gift shop I was surprised to see one full aisle of different flavors of mini shortbread cookies – most made by the local company Kauia Kookies, with flavors from guava, pineapple, mango, coconut, chocolate chip, peanut butter, and macadamia nut.   The company was founded in 1965 by Mabel Hashisaka, who founded the company to offer a dessert for her father’s family business, a snack bar.    They were intended to be omiyage (souveneir gifts) to interisland travelers.    Mabel incorporated guava and macadamia nuts to differentiate her cookies into a local fave.   By the 1980s there was such high demand the family built a large facility in Hanapepe.

When I checked into my hotel, I was not given a can of macademia nuts or even chocolate mints, but a box of macadamia shortbread cookies.   And they were mini size – no cookies were bigger than two inches.   That’s because these were standards of the Hawaiian public school lunch system from the 1950s into the turn of the 21^st century.  They were made small to fit in the smaller compartments of the metal kid lunch trays of the school system.   And like the school lunch pizzas or Bosco Sticks of mainland kids, these tiny shortbread cookies are crystallized in the hearts of local Hawaiians.

But the legacy of these cookies goes back even further into the early 1900s.   Grove Farm, a living history museum celebrating the sugar cane plantation and history of George Wilcox, one of the largest and most successful sugar cane barons on Kauai, serves the grandmother of these cookies.   They make them in the original 1900 wood fired oven of the plantation house, and they’re called Grove Farm Ice Box cookies.   They’re crisp like the shortbread cookies, sugary, buttery with a strong flavor of local vanilla.   They serve them alongside mint iced tea and they’re spectacular.   They were a fave of Miss Mabel Wilcox, the last descendant to live on the property.   Like Sugar Cane Baron August Spreckles of Maui (who was an 1830s partner in a Brooklyn sugar refinery with Johan Doscher, father of Claus Doscher, founder of our oldest Cincy Candy Company), the land of the Wilcox plantation was obtained from Princess Ruth Le’eokilani.   She was a direct descendant of the first great Hawaiian King Kamehameha I, of the last royal family of the Kingdom of Hawaii before American business interests took over the islands in a forced coup in 1893.

Another company, Honolulu’s Diamond Bakery made three types of crunchy cookies starting in the  1930s, ,that were sold in bulk out in general stores out of wooden barrels with a scoop.    Large soft cookies would never have been able to be sold like this.

Other companies saw the success of Kauai Kookie and in 1981 Kaiw Kwee, a Chinese-Indonesian immigrant opened Cook Kwee’s Cookie Company in Maui.  They were followed in 1983 by Alan Ikawa who opened Big Island Candie Company, who consulted with a Maui hotel owner who wanted a small packagable snack to be included in mini bars.     In 1984 partners Loretta Edmunds and Virginia Sarano, who had retired from Barber’s Point Elementary School in Oahu opened School Kine Cookies.   They based them on the butter shortbread cookies they baked for schoolkids in the cafeteria kitchen.

With the ownership of these companies being largely those of Japanese ancestry, another cookies has popped up alongside the shortbreads.    That’s the Japanese manju, a chewy cookie filled with red bean paste.   You can see these at many Hawaiian bakeries in their sales cases.

Over time, numerous other companies started making the mini butter shortbread cookies, packaged in the same oblong package as Kauai Kookies.     And, this delicious distinct product became a favorite take home using local ingredients and a fun gradeschool history.    They go well as a dipper with your morning Kona coffee.