Robert Taira

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Robert Taira (November 5, 1923 – May 29, 2003) founded King's Hawaiian bakery. He was born in Hilo, Hawaii, the ninth of eleven children of Okinawan immigrants. He served in the U.S. Army as a translator during the occupation of Japan after World War II. He believed Japan would become receptive to Western goods and dreamed of opening businesses there, considering clothing and jewelry before choosing a Western-style bakery.

After his Army service, he studied baking in Hilo and Chicago, but the Korean War in 1950 closed Japan to regular civilians, so he stayed in Hawaii and opened Robert's Bakery in Hilo that year. He began by baking fine cakes and later explored other baked goods. He loved Portuguese sweet bread, which would go hard after a day, so he finally tweaked the recipe to extend its shelf life while keeping its cake-like flavor, creating a shelf-stable bread that could be mass-produced for supermarkets.

In 1963 he moved the bakery to King Street in Honolulu and renamed it King’s Hawaiian after the street. Hawaiian bread became very popular on the islands and then along the West Coast. Later he moved the business to the mainland, building a bakery in Torrance, California in 1977. By the 1980s the company earned about $20 million a year. In 1988 he opened King’s Hawaiian Bakery and Restaurant in Torrance, offering a wider range of baked goods beyond Hawaiian bread. His family now runs both the large industrial bakery and the bakery/restaurant. His son Mark Taira took over company operations in 1983.