SPOTLIGHT ON SUCCESS
Ralph S. Inouye Co. Ltd. debuts the Wahiawā Product Development Center BY BRETT ALEXANDER-ESTES Cultivating a New Generation of Farmers
T he Wahiawā Product Development Center at
Co. Ltd. (RSI) project manager. The project was also ordered well in advance. “The bid date was April 7, 2020,” says Goo. “We didn’t start onsite until July 1, 2021.” The jobsite was an existing 29,000-square-foot warehouse at LCC with “pretty good bones” — a solid framework to support new meeting spaces, offices, a commercial kitchen, along with food processing and pack- aging areas and new, top-of-the-line equipment. The $14,296,000 renovation also included structural changes.
“There were some step-downs that maybe weren’t ideal at that location,” Goo says. “We did have to form and pour back some concrete toppings … to provide larger [interior] spaces.” A LOOK INSIDE Forty to 50 percent of interior space is devoted to food production and packaging equipment and activity. “There’s a dry production area, a wet production area, a packaging area, specialty kitchen area, refrig- eration units, dry storage,” says Goo. Hyperbaric processing equipment — which uses high pressure to neutralize
Leeward Community College was meticulously planned.
The University of Hawai‘i wanted students to have “an entrepreneurial space, an incuba- tion space, mostly geared to farmers, food producers, chefs, and providing space for them to
Eric Goo
learn as well as practice or refine their ideas,” says Eric Goo, Ralph S. Inouye
54 | BUILDING INDUSTRY HAWAII | OCTOBER 2023
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