Fujioka’s Super Market
closes in HaleiwaA sister store of Foodland
will take its place
A century-old local family grocery business is at an end with the closing of Fujioka's Super Market in Haleiwa, but a sister of Foodland Super Market Ltd. will open a grocery and sundries store on the same spot next month.
Norman Fujioka, operations manager of Fujioka's and a grandson of founder Ryutaro Fujioka, said the family got an offer it decided to accept.
The Fujiokas were looking at the same scenario other old mom-and-pop businesses face -- a lot of years invested in a business, but a need for new capital investment to stay up with the times -- and had to decide whether it was worth it.
"It was an opportunity where we were kind of at the end of a business cycle," Fujioka said.
He is 48 and his brother Greg, also involved in the business, is 54 and they could have kept on, said Norman, but it seemed like a good idea to take the offer from Kalama Beach Corp.
Norman said he has spent 25 years of his life at the supermarket and doesn't know exactly what he will do next, but it is time for him to quit. "I'll just take a break," he said.
While the Fujioka family members won't be in the grocery business, they are still invested in Haleiwa.
They will continue to own the 29,000-square-foot lot under the 11,000-square-foot store at 66-190 Kamehameha Highway and a commercial lot of about the same size next door, plus a piece of land of about 6,000 square feet occupied by a drive-in restaurant.
The official closing of Fujioka's was set for the end of the day today, but it was already closed yesterday. It will open as Malama Market next month.
"A lot of independent supermarkets are either closing or doing something else and ours won't be the last," Norman Fujioka said.
Foodland/Food Pantry officials said Kalama Beach is a separate company although its headquarters address is the same as Foodland's. Kalama Beach has Hawaii-related gift stores on the mainland and grocery/sundries stores in Hawaii.
State business-registration records show Foodland CEO Jenai Sullivan Wall and other Foodland-related people are directors at Kalama, but its operation chief, Darcy Takushi, and President Thomas R. Weston are not shown as part of the Foodland business.
"I think that Kalama really gives it an opportunity to take it to the next level. They have the financial resources (to invest in improvements). We aren't willing to take that gamble," Fujioka said.
Meanwhile, he said, the store has been doing well, like the rest of Haleiwa. There was a dip in business when a new road bypassed the town in the mid-1990s, but that has more than been made up for by a boost Haleiwa has attained by becoming a destination in itself.
Traffic in Haleiwa would have been much worse without the bypass, Fujioka said.
His family is descended from sugar workers from Japan who started the first store in Waialua in the early 1900s. The Haleiwa supermarket was opened in 1985.
