Helping to Feed Hawai‘i Since 1913

Y. Hata & Co. is a locally owned and operated company that uses trucks and barges to transport food, ingredients, supples and other necessities from their warehouses to businesses statewide.

Y. Hata & Co. helps keep people in Hawaiʻi fed by distributing food, ingredients, supplies and other necessities to restaurants, hotels, schools and military bases statewide.

Founded in Hilo in 1913, the family-owned business now operates warehouses in Honolulu, Līhuʻe and Hilo. Its facilities store a wide range of products, from dry, frozen and shelf-stable foods to paper goods and cleaning supplies.

Its Honolulu location on Sand Island Access Road “is the headquarters, so we typically intake everything here and then distribute it out to the different islands. We send products out via barge or air freight,” explains Preston Keliihoomalu, the company’s senior transportation manager.

The last leg of the journey is transporting products from the warehouses to customers via delivery trucks. Y. Hata’s fleet handles deliveries on Oʻahu, Kauaʻi and Hawaiʻi Island. It also ships goods to Maui, Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi, and works with “third-party vendor transportation companies” to complete the deliveries, Keliihoomalu says.

Pictured, Honolulu warehouse lead Raymark Munoz uses a pallet jack to load a “cube” of products onto a Y. Hata trailer. Keliihoomalu notes that the Honolulu transportation team manages 25 to 30 routes on Oʻahu, with each route having multiple stops.

“Making sure Hawaiʻi is fed, as a local, gives me a sense of pride,” he says.