HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Hurricane Lala’s damage to farms and agricultural operations is creating a ripple effect for restaurants that rely on locally grown products, with some businesses facing shortages, canceled events, and lost revenue.
At Cafe Pesto in Hilo, the storm has already affected the restaurant’s supply of locally grown produce.
“Our lettuce farmers are short on the lettuce that we get. And that’s just the damage from the rain,” said Casey Halpern, chief operating officer of Cafe Pesto.
The restaurant also canceled a planned wine dinner because Halpern said it did not feel right in light of the storm.
“We canceled a special event that we were going to do,” Halpern said. “We didn’t feel like it was the right time to, you know, promote something like that.”
Cafe Pesto also lost food during a power outage, resulting in “several thousand dollars of food that we had to discard,” Halpern said.
The losses extend beyond food. “We lost two days of business, which is also hard on our employees who are depending on that income,” Halpern said.
The disruption is also affecting agricultural operations preparing for upcoming harvests.
At O.K. Farms Hawaii, coffee harvesting was scheduled to begin Sept. 1, but that timeline has been pushed back.
“We had plans to start our coffee harvest season on September 1st. We had a bunch of H-2A workers coming in to help us with the harvest, so that all got delayed,” said Troy Keolanui, chief agricultural manager for Olson Trust, which operates O.K. Farms Hawaii.
The Hawaii Restaurant Association says the effects are being felt throughout the restaurant industry as farmers, distributors, and suppliers recover from the storm.
President and CEO Sheryl Matsuoka said restaurants are reporting delays in receiving products because multiple parts of the supply chain were affected.
“I’m definitely seeing that many of the restaurants are saying their distributors and suppliers were also impacted by the storm. So they aren’t getting replenished as quickly as they normally would because everybody’s impacted,” Matsuoka said. “The farmers, they’re impacted because the floods took out their crops.”
For restaurants that emphasize locally sourced ingredients, those disruptions can mean adjusting menus based on what is available.
But Matsuoka said restaurants are also trying to remain a source of support for communities recovering from Lala, despite facing their own financial losses.
“No matter how much they’re impacted, they want to help the community because families were impacted,” Matsuoka said. “They’re already struggling, but they know if they can just provide food for the people who are around them, and they’re in the community, they want to do that.”
The Hawaii Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity said it is working with the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency and Hawaii County to assess agricultural damage from the storm.
The department said the assessment will help determine the needs of farmers and ranchers as they work to recover and resume operations.
For local restaurants, the recovery on the farm could ultimately determine what products make it onto menus in the weeks ahead.
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