Maui Business Report

Sweet and Healthy Success

Food truck capitalizes on island’s appetite for acai bowls

Kuulei Hanohano and partner Toni Matsuda didn’t set out to become the acai queens of Maui. As students at the University of Hawaii Maui College, where they also worked part time, the two were looking for a side job to help pay their tuition. So Hanohano turned to her favorite treat: acai bowls.

“Every time I would go home to Oahu, I would eat acai bowls, and when I came back to Maui, nobody had acai bowls,” she says. She started making the snack, a thick acai fruit smoothie piled with sliced fruit, granola, honey, and other toppings, to feed her own craving, and soon family and friends were asking for them as well. In 2014, she and Matsuda began selling them out of a cheerful, purple trailer they built themselves, calling their business Mo Ono Hawaii. “We would do pop-ups at different events, just starting slow,” she says.

Partners Kuulei Hanohano and Toni Matsuda started
selling acai bowls to raise money for college. | Photo: Courtesy of The Office of Hawaiian Affairs

When their jobs at UHMC went on hiatus for a few months, the two turned to their acai bowls to fill in the gap. “We did Mo Ono at the Kahului Harbor semi-full-time, just to get through that little break,” Hanohano recalls.

To their surprise, the business was so successful it quickly replaced their former incomes, and they loved having a flexible schedule and working for themselves. “That’s when we decided, let’s do this full time.”

Since then, Mo Ono has grown to a thriving business. Last year, the partners replaced their homemade trailer with a larger one purchased with a loan from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. “This year what we’re hoping for is to be able to get a second food truck up and running,” Hanohano says. “People come from all over the island to get our acai bowls, so we want to be more mobile so we’re able to go to them.”