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Food Box

An assortment of fresh produce from a small Healthy Harvest Bag
Image: Jamie Noguchi

The Herbivore’s Goodie Bag

Holoholo delivers fresh produce from local farms
by Katrina Valcourt | Dec 12, 2012

When Holoholo General Store founder Jill Nordby discovered that 85 percent of our food is imported, she was shocked. After being a client of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) business on Maui, she moved to Oahu to begin her own.

“I wanted to create new channels of distribution rather than farmers markets . . . to bring fresh, local produce to people,” Nordby says, doing so with her Healthy Harvest Bags. Each bag–mini ($25), small ($43) and medium ($53)–contains an assortment of fruits and vegetables from various local farms that can feed up to six people per week, depending on the size of the bag.

The Weekly sampled her small bag, which included lettuce, corn, kale, red cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, green bell peppers, apple bananas, bok choy, cucumbers, papayas, an onion and an orange, all labeled “non-sprayed,” as in pesticide-free. Along with a hefty reusable burlap bag, the produce came with recipes for cucumber salad and “Hold da Mayo Cold Slaw.” Recipes change with “what’s in season, what’s coming [and] what farmers are growing for us,” Nordby explains.

Holoholo has formed two useful partnerships. Design My Meals, an interactive meal-planning website, creates a shopping list based on what’s in your Holoholo bag each week (for a free trial, go to [designmymeals.com]), while Holoholo @ Home or the Office will educate you during a series of cooking lessons from Chef Andrea Bertoli of Manis Kitchenworks. “[It] gives customers a lot of tips on how to eat healthy within the week and makes meal planning easier . . . in a way that will help everyone who wants convenience, without resorting to fast food,” Nordby says.

Drop-off/pick-up points include Kale’s Natural Foods in Hawaii Kai and American Savings Bank downtown. To add a new venue, at least 10 subscribers are required. Nordby hopes to expand her business to a mobile market that can “holoholo around” into neighborhoods, much like the yasai trucks of the past.

[Holoholostore.com], 281-6141

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