Roots Food Hub
Located in the Roots Cafe, our "Food Hub" stocks locally grown produce, eggs, and poi fresh from our farmers - we believe food is medicine, and that access to healthy, culturally significant foods can heal our bodies and communities.
Storefront
Tuesday & Thursday
11:00am - 1:30pm
What is A Food Hub?
A food hub can be lots of things. At its simplest, a food hub is a strategy for meeting a need in the community for more affordable, more accessible food. Food hubs attempt to address this need by serving as a wholesale intermediary - by buying food and then distributing it. Hubs can take many different forms. Some hubs do everything - buy produce, store it, deliver it, retail it. Others just provide warehouse facilities and partner with a distributor. Some hubs provide marketing assistance - helping small farms build brands and advertise. Some are non-profits, some are for-profit, and some are mixed. But all have one thing in common: a desire for solutions that the current food system doesn't provide.
Our Mission
The Roots Food Hub strives to create partnerships with producers of cultural foods, particularly Pacific staple foods such as cassava, breadfruit, kalo, and banana. The current Hawaii foodscape has a dearth of accessible and affordable cultural staples. These foods, as the deepest signifiers of identity, memory, and pride for our Kalihi population, are also the most sorely missed. Though all healthy foods are welcome in our Food Hub, our abiding mission is strengthening farmer capacity to produce cultural staples and to form strong, enduring linkages from those farms to the plates of our community.
What is Our Food Hub?
In addition to ono prepared foods, the Roots Cafe also operates the Food Hub, a mini-market stocked with produce and cultural food products from our Food Hub partners, including customer favorites like Kakoʻo ʻŌiwi Poi and fresh Farm eggs. We look forward to expanding our product offerings, to be able to provide diversified ways for our friends to manage and celebrate their health.
What is the Roots Food Hub?
Our Model
At the moment, the Roots Food Hub is an "everything" hub: we work with small and micro-producers to buy their products; we store those products at our mini-facility at the KKV Wellness Center and, in some cases, provide packaging services; we transport the product to a handful of retail sites; and we do the reselling with little or no price mark-up. It's an intensive job, and since we've elected to remain a non-profit, not a financially rewarding one. But by prioritizing a fair price for our farmers, and a fair price for our customers, we're working to create a system that values local, cultural, sustainable foods and values equal access to those foods.
Our Actions
The Food Hub currently partners with about 30 farmers and producers to provide healthy options to the Kalihi community. Thanks to their tireless labor and commitment, the Food Hub is dedicated to cultural preservation, seasonality, and fair economics. Our offerings include free-range eggs, fresh poi, local fish, breadfruit, kalo, cassava, banana, leafy greens, and a rainbow of fruits. However, it's important to note that not all these items are always available due to seasonality and varying harvests. We strive to provide a diverse selection of fresh, culturally significant foods while adapting to the rhythms of local agriculture.
“When youʻre with foods you love, stories come more naturally” ”