We are proud and honored to have The Local General Store, a Hawaii borrower, featured as the cover story in Pacific Business News on June 16, 2023. Please see an excerpt from the story below. To read the full feature, please visit Pacific Business News: Brick and Mortar Dreams.
The Local General Store, run by the married baker-and-butcher duo Harley and Jason Chow, has expanded from farmers markets and pop-up shops to its first brick-and-mortar store in Kaimuki.
“This was actually always the goal,” said Jason. “My wife and I moved back to Oahu in 2019, so right before Covid started. We had this whole plan to open up a space and take baby steps in getting there. Farmers markets [were] our first step. And then Covid happThree years later, the couple has opened a nearly 1,200-square-foot store that is “part bakery, part whole-animal butcher shop and all love,” according to yelp.
The new storefront was financed with the help of a $100,000 loan through the Feed the Hunger Fund, a nonprofit helping to fund sustainable local food systems in Hawaii and California. The loan includes a 4% annual percentage rate over seven years, the Chows said.
Working with Feed the Hunger Fund was different from traditional banks, which need three years of records to give substantial loans, Jason said.
“We didn’t have that. I mean, we had a little bit of records, but it was based on a once-a-week pop-up,” he said. “But [with] Feed the Hunger Fund, we were able to sit down with them and go through all of our financials and our projections, and luckily they had faith that we would be able to pay off the loan.”