Hawaii imports somewhere between 85% and 90% of its food.
That is the state government’s own estimate, and it means almost everything in a Honolulu grocery cart crossed roughly 2,400 miles of ocean to get there.
You cannot negotiate with the Pacific. The distance is the distance.
So when we ask how a local grocery chain beats shipping costs, the honest answer is that it does not. Nobody does.
What Foodland actually did was build a business around the small number of things that never have to get on a boat.