Hawaiian Rainbow Bees is the second largest honey manufacturer in Hawaii. Our honey goes straight from the bee to the bottle.

The majority of our honey comes from about 1,500 hives on the Big Island. I’m a beekeeper myself, and have about 50 hives on Oahu.

I originally started this company for my health. I have severe allergies, and I had heard that raw honey could be a natural way to help. Turns out that raw, minimally treated honey has three natural enzymes: two aid digestion, and the other is an antibacterial.

When I started taking honey, I found that my allergy symptoms were mitigated. It was also giving me energy throughout the day, more health and more mental clarity. Honey was really helping me, so I decided to keep bees.

Today, we sell four different kinds of honey. We have a multi-floral that comes from both islands, and we have macadamia nut, lehua and Christmas berry honeys that come from the Big Island.

Our iconic packaging says “aloha” from Hawaii. With help from a hula halau, and imagery from the Bishop Museum, and the “Place of Refuge” on the Big Island, we developed our signature tiki bottle. Recently we also developed our lifestyle honey pouch that you can take anywhere. It stands up by itself, and is very convenient for travel, sports and fitness.

I opened my business accounts with Bank of Hawaii because I found their lending practices were better for my business. As I spent more time with my bank representatives, they got to know me and became my friends. Rowena Pingol, Summerset Lovett and all of the staff at the Mānoa Branch know me by name and provide great service.

It’s essential to work with a bank located here in the islands. My bankers are working as my partners, giving me professional support through their financial expertise.

I recently applied for a loan at Bank of Hawaii to buy my own business location. We’re renting our current warehouse location, and it’s one of the properties that’s in the path of the rail project. To protect the company, we purchased a property in an industrial mixed-use zone, a two-bedroom home in Kalihi that we can fall back to, if necessary. Right now, we’re using it for storage, housing and income. So we’re saving money and able to grow.

Matt Luga was my loan officer for the mortgage. He was great at navigating me through the process, visited properties with me, and helped me analyze them to see if they were really going to work.

I see my business growing, and Bank of Hawaii as an important partner in that growth. In the first four years of the company we grew from $100,000 in sales to over $1 million in sales. To continue growing, my vision is to look outward and also to sell more deeply to the local market. That includes supplying local bakeries, breweries and smaller shops, and looking into custom branding.

We want to make Hawaiian Rainbow Bees honey, Hawaii’s honey. We’re doing stronger sales in Japan, and we’re excited to grow in other places in Asia by working with Chinese and Taiwanese distributors. We also want to move more honey to California and the West Coast. We have honey in San Francisco now, and we’re really close to doing more business nationally. This is all very exciting.

We have the honey for this expansion; there are more beekeepers here who want to work with us. So, I see we’re all going to grow, and we’re going to grow with Bank of Hawaii.