Puk Sup Turned 100. It Never Tried to Beat Foodland Next Door.

There is a Foodland inside Pukalani Terrace Center. Full aisles, full deli case, the works. Fifty feet away, in the same shopping center, sits a smaller market that predates the shopping center itself by decades. On paper, the smaller store has no reason to still be standing. In practice, the line for bentos at lunchtime tells a different story.

That smaller store is the Pukalani Superette, known to almost everyone Upcountry as Puk Sup. This year it turned 100. The anniversary itself is the easy headline. The more useful thing to understand, if you actually live at this corner, is why a hundred-year-old grocery store is still doing business a few doors down from a chain that could out-stock it on almost anything.

A Hundred Years at the Same Corner

The store has occupied the corner of Makawao Avenue and Old Haleakalā Highway since 1926. It started as Tanizaki Store, opened by Kome and Takeo Tanizaki after the couple immigrated from Japan to work on the plantation and saved enough to open their first shop in Wailuku. A fire destroyed that original location, which is what pushed the family to Pukalani in the first place. The name changed to Pukalani Superette in December 1955, a shift that also marked an expansion to serve the growing population of Pukalani, Makawao, and Kula.

Three generations later, the Nakashima family still runs it. Co-owner Myles Nakashima has said the location itself is a big part of the store's staying power, calling it one of the prime spots in Upcountry. His brother and co-owner Aric Nakashima has framed the family's connection more simply, crediting the grandparents who started it all. Their generation is already handing the business forward. Aric's daughter, Megan Nakashima, is stepping into a leadership role at the store, which means the fourth generation is now learning the same corner her great-grandparents worked.

The Niche, Not the Aisle Count

Here is the part most retrospectives skip past. Puk Sup was, in its own history, once the one-stop shop for Upcountry, the place people got bentos, prepared foods, and groceries before supermarkets existed in the way we now think of them. That era ended decades ago. A real supermarket moved into the very same shopping center. And the corner store did not fold.

Aric Nakashima has said the reason comes down to constant, small course corrections. In his own words, the key has been adjusting, finding the store's niche, and continuing to change over time. That is not a nostalgia strategy. It is a survival strategy, and it explains something concrete about why Puk Sup and Foodland can sit fifty feet apart without one erasing the other. The supermarket wins on volume and selection. The corner store won by narrowing its job to what a supermarket format is worse at: fast bentos, prepared foods, catering, and curbside pickup for someone who just needs to get in and out. Longtime customer Kelsy Bal put the appeal in the plainest terms possible, saying the store is close to home and carries most of what she actually buys most of the time. That is not a review of a destination. That is a description of a habit.

The lesson for anyone paying attention to how small Upcountry businesses actually last is that permanence here has rarely been about resisting change. It has been about picking a lane precisely enough that a bigger competitor moving in next door does not make you irrelevant.

The Corner Doesn't End at the Register

Puk Sup sits inside a shopping center that functions as the actual hub of daily errands for Pukalani, and it is worth knowing what else is there. Pukalani Terrace Center holds Foodland, Ace Hardware, a Bank of Hawaiʻi branch, and a Starbucks, all clustered at the intersection of Old Haleakalā Highway and Pukalani Street. If you have been looking for the old bottle and can redemption center that used to operate out of the Terrace Center, it has since relocated to Eddie Tam in Makawao, so that stop now takes a short drive rather than a walk across the same parking lot.

A short distance away sits the Mayor Hannibal Tavares Community Center, the county's name for what most residents just call the rec complex. It anchors a park with the Upcountry Aquatic Center, a skate park, a children's playground, and ballfields that host baseball, softball, soccer, and football. Between the Terrace Center and the Tavares complex, a surprising amount of a Pukalani resident's actual week happens within a few hundred yards.

Who Actually Shows Up When Upcountry Needs Something

The centennial matters more than a plaque on the wall because the store keeps showing up in the same civic moments that hold the neighborhood together. Every July, Pukalani Terrace Center runs its Back-to-School Drive with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Maui. The fifth annual drive ran July 18, 2026, collecting supplies for Upcountry students heading into the 2026-27 school year, with giveaways that included an overnight stay at the Maui Coast Hotel, Kula Country Farms gift certificates, and a $75 gift card to Fabianis. In past years, donation bins for the drive were staged at Ace Hardware, Kalei's Lunchbox, and the Bank of Hawaiʻi branch right there in the center.

Puk Sup shows up differently, but it shows up. When The Sewing Hui of Maui put out the call for prize contributors ahead of the 2026 Maui Fiber Arts Show, running October 1 through 4 at Queen Kaʻahumanu Center, the confirmed list of donors included Pukalani Superette alongside Starbucks Pukalani, Cafe O'Lei, Calypso Maui, and Surfing Goat Dairy. A hundred-year-old grocery store getting named specifically, next to businesses across the island, is a small but real signal that the store's community ties are current, not just something written on a wall for tourists.

The Quiet Vote Nobody Watches

If you want to see how Pukalani actually governs its own small-scale concerns, skip the county council livestream and look instead at the Pukalani Community Association. It meets quarterly in the downstairs room of the Hannibal Tavares Center, from 6 to 8 p.m., and anyone can attend. Annual membership runs five dollars for an individual, ten for a family, and twenty for a business. There is no glamour in that structure, and that is the point. A neighborhood association charging ten dollars a year for a family membership is not a marketing exercise. It is the actual, unglamorous mechanism by which a place like Pukalani decides what it cares about, one quarterly meeting at a time.

What the Hundred Years Actually Proves

It is tempting to read a store's centennial as a story about tradition holding steady against time. The more accurate read, based on what the family that runs it has actually said, is that the store survived because it kept refusing to stay the same. It gave up being the only grocery option the moment it had to. It became the fast, familiar, personal option instead, the one where the woman behind the counter knows what you usually buy. That distinction is why it can share a parking lot with a full supermarket and still be the one people call by its nickname.

Megan Nakashima stepping into the business now is not a sentimental footnote. It is the same pattern repeating, a fourth generation figuring out what job the store needs to do next. If the last hundred years are any indication, the store will keep changing in ways that are barely visible from the sidewalk, and it will still be the corner everyone in Pukalani means when they say they're headed to Puk Sup.

If this corner of Upcountry is more than a stop on your errand list, if it's the place you're actually building a life around, Mino McLean knows this street, this shopping center, and this community the way longtime residents do. When the pull of Pukalani turns into a real conversation about property here, request a personalized consultation and talk it through with a team that already calls this corner home.