#Hawaii’s iconic Love’s Bakery closing after 170 years due to COVID

Hawaiians are bidding a bittersweet aloha to a beloved longtime bakery.

Love’s Bakery will close at the end of March, after the COVID-19 pandemic brought the operation to its knees, SFGate reports.

The bakery has been spreading the love since 1851, and first fired up its ovens more than a century before Hawaii became the 50th state.

The Honolulu mainstay employees 231 people — who will all lose their jobs — and normally distributes about 400,000 loaves to 1,800 customers every week, the website reports.

Demand for bread is way down during the pandemic, with hotels and restaurants closed and increased local competition had reportedly taking a big cut out of Love’s dough.

Loves said it was “seriously delinquent” in rent payments, and spent all $2.8 million it received in federal COVID-19 relief loans to maintain payroll, according to the site.

“We have worked diligently to cut expenses, to maintain our market share and to remedy our operational difficulties, however under the current business environment we are no longer able to continue operations,” the company said in a statement to the media, the outlet said.

Hawaii’s geographic isolation also contributed to the bakery’s pandemic woes.

“COVID-19 has also impacted many of our mainland suppliers causing delays in the ingredients and replacement parts for our aging bakery equipment,” its Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) letter and Hawaii Dislocated Workers Act notice said. “With the decline in revenue and the increasing expenses to keep a bakery running, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations as a faltering business.”

When Love’s Bakery kneaded its first loaf of bread 170 years ago, King Kamehameha III was on the Hawaiian throne.

Love’s homegrown operations rapidly expanded during the world wars, and by 1943 the company was baking bread around the clock in a 144-foot-long oven that put out 8,000 loaves an hour, SF Gate said.

By 1945, it was reportedly flying the bread to neighboring islands by charter plane as Hawaii’s population rapidly grew.

Businesses around the nation and the world have been struggling to make bread since the pandemic shuttered commerce. More than half of US businesses forced to close will never reopen again, according to one study.