KAPAA — A Kauai cattle company and livestock processor is expanding both its product selection and availability throughout Hawaii, a year after purchasing its Oahu USDA-inspected livestock harvest facility.
Kunoa manages a herd of 2,000 cattle across several thousand acres of former sugarcane land on Kauai and works with producers throughout the state to source pasture-raised, no-added hormone, antibiotic-free beef.
The company has surpassed a major $3 million equity financing milestone. It recently received $650,000 in equity financing from the nonprofit VoLo Foundation in Florida, which supports environmental, educational and global health initiatives, as well as $100,000 from a Kona-based investor.
“With this recent financing, we are launching product lines into several new channels to better serve the Hawaii marketplace,” said Kunoa co-founder Bobby Farias. “We’ve also completed major upgrades to enhance animal welfare and meat quality, and improve food safety since we purchased our Oahu facility.”
Kunoa offers an assortment of popular beef cuts including tenderloin, rib eye and brisket, as well as specialty items like beef tongue and marrow bones, at Times Supermarkets locations throughout Oahu and Maui. In April, Kunoa began selling Hawaii-grown ground beef at Times, its largest partnership with a Hawaii grocer.
Its beef jerky snack, Kunoa Beef Bars, are available at all Times, Safeway and 7-Eleven stores statewide.
Additional locations include Healthy Hut on Kauai, Kokua Market on Oahu, Mana Foods on Maui and The Locavore Store on the Island of Hawaii, among others. Beef bars can also be ordered online from Amazon.
To serve Hawaii restaurants, Kunoa has launched a distribution program with H&W Foodservice/Palama Meats on Oahu and Y. Hata on Kauai.
Kunoa has partnered with direct-to-consumer channels such as Oahu Fresh, a home delivery service; Forage Hawaii, an Oahu farmer’s market operator; and GoodEggs.com, a home delivery service in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Nice ad for Kunoa. Too bad it’s presented as news.
Congratulations to a business that has covered probably all the bases including health factors for the animals and even in some ways also for their consumers; it was certainly not an easy task and must have included a lot of forethought to the benefit of the consumers.
A majority of the world has to live without the savory benefit of food produced from animals and this is because of those people’s cultural differences and their historical tastes in food; boiling it down to fruits, grains, and vegetables vs. animal meats and organs and their milk products.
While many foreign cultures lack the delicious benefits from animal food absent in their diet, health science studies show these same foreign peoples have statistics that show they have very low incidences of the same chronic diseases that shorten the lives of Americans who get to enjoy beef and other animal products.
There are alternatives and preventions to heart and vascular disease (stroke), and the many cancers occurring in America at epidemic rates. There are time tested preventions to disease and historical methods of optimal health and life longevity that include the majority of foods used by mankind since the days when agriculture was founded some thousands of years ago along fresh water-ways, those benefits included the grains, fruits, and vegetables with sometimes a sprinkling of animal foods.
We have so many 90+ and some 100+ seniors here on Kauai that the knowledge of their dietary regime might serve the rest of us well in our health by having a simple questionnaire provided to them for our collective benefits.
Perhaps a questionnaire/survey covering a wide group of 90+ year old people of the several cultural backgrounds of the people on Kauai, both male and female, would point out the differences in the benefits of an optional health and life longevity dietary regime.
Mahalo,
Charles
” upgrades to enhance animal welfare and meat quality,”
Wouldn’t real animal welfare include not killing them?
Hurray for Kunoa and pasture-raised, no-added hormone, antibiotic-free beef. We need environmental friendly ag on our islands. Thank you! As for “livestock harvest facility”, that I assume, would be a slaughter house? Lets not try to dress this up too much.
Probably by pounding the animals head unto the cement concrete. Or driving the head between large vise grips and squeezing it. Or some other options.