Ke Au Hou, Vol. 20

In 2024, it took 7,345 miles of off-roading, wearing out 18 sets of tires and 75 pairs of Lacrosse Boots, fielding 586 lbs of ammunition, shouldering 1.5 million lbs of deer, washing the floors 912 times, watching 321 sunrises, sharpening our knives 2,568 times, and drinking 3,369 cups of coffee. We worked 110,018 hours on the butcher floor, printed 84,035 labels, and shipped 80,164 orders, alongside 24,550 local orders. This year, we welcomed 27,600 new customers and now proudly serve over 15,000 ʻOhana and Snack Members whose support makes our collective impact possible.

 

Our team accomplished the extraordinary! With the same resources and people, we increased annual harvesting and processing by 37%, turning 15,788 deer into 670,990 pounds of nutrient-dense food. Together, we reached our mission goal of balancing populations and providing families across Hawai‘i and the continent with sustainable, high-quality protein, all while helping to protect Maui’s eco- and food systems.

 

In keeping with last year's end-of-year review, we wanted to share Maui Nui, by the numbers, 2024:

Mahalo nui loa to our incredible team and our ʻOhana of customers for being part of such an impactful year.

In Hawaiʻi, it has long been said, “aia ke ola i ka waha,” that life is in the words of our mouths, that, depending on what we choose to speak out loud, we can either diminish ourselves and our surroundings or we can enchant a more vibrant world into being. How sobering and also how encouraging to see ourselves as wielders of such agency. 

 

To be sure, there is some universal agreement on the weight of spoken words. Why else do we pray? Why else turn to our mantras, to our chants and songs? Why the team cheer? Why the pledge and poem and verse? 

After years and years of late night team huddles full of route-plan reviews and safety reminders, all ending in abrupt zooming-offs into the dark, it was finally time to find a better way to ground ourselves, daily, in the rhythms and the reasons of and for our work. 

A kāhoa, a group chant that is called back and forth, was composed. It includes some of the beautiful sentiments of "ʻO Ka ʻAi Ka ʻAi," written by Kekua Burgess, and can sometimes take on (as the historian, Emerson, described of the chanting of the koa tree harvesters of old), “a wild song and chorus.”

 

And the questioning goes on, asking what comes from the health of the forests and the abundance of the seas? What is all of ours when it rains? Always the same answer. 

And here, at the end of such an impactful year, the last stanza of our kāhoa seems especially poignant. It points to the roles and functions of each of our teams, from Harvest and Butcher to Operations and Marketing. Translated, it asks—what comes from the sharpness of our eyes and the strength of our backs? What comes from the excellence of our hands and the carefulness of our words? Sustenance. 

 

And inasmuch as our team is sustained by this wild endeavor we call Maui Nui, we sustain it. Our team builds and feeds this collective and crazy dream and they carry it forward as further sustenance for our communities and customers, for our places. And so, an end-of-the-year GIF of all their faces, a stand-in for all the mahalo I wish I could commit to weighty enough spoken words.