Job cuts planned at Maui Pine Co.
By Christie Wilson
Neighbor Island Editor
KAHULUI, Maui — Maui Pineapple Co. will be reducing its work force and farmed acreage over the next five years as it continues to respond to greater market demand for fresh products.
The company last week notified workers and their union that six positions at the Kahului cannery would be eliminated.
Additional job cuts over the next four or five years will be necessary, President Doug Schenk said yesterday, but the company hopes to do that through "normal attrition" from workers who leave on their own or retire.
During that same period, Maui Pine will reduce its farm operations from 7,000 acres to about 6,000 acres, he said. Most of the farmland that will be phased out is in West Maui.
Schenk said trucking fruit from the Lahaina side of the island has been more costly than from East Maui and Upcountry fields because of problems on two-lane Honoapi'ilani Highway, which is subject to frequent traffic jams and closures due to car wrecks.
"We intend to remain farming in West Maui but at a lower level," Schenk said.
The cutbacks will not affect Maui Pine's arrangement with a private grower in Ha'iku who supplies 10,000 tons of pineapple a year — about 6 percent of the company' needs, according to Schenk.
Maui Pine, a subsidiary of publicly traded Maui Land & Pineapple, has 1,100 employees at its cannery and plantation operations. The company operates Hawai'i's only surviving pineapple cannery, and it struggles with low prices for canned pineapple and competition from canneries in Southeast Asia that pay low wages.
Its chief rivals, Dole and Del Monte, import their canned pineapple from Thailand and the Philippines.
Maui Pine has lost $10 million in the past two years, including a $4.6 million operating loss for the first nine months of 2002.
Schenk said the company's new business plan includes changing its product mix to reduce canned sales and increase sales of fresh whole and sliced pineapple, ready-to-eat fruit mixes and other noncanned items.
"Canned fruit sales generally are flat or declining. People just don't eat out of cans anymore," Schenk said. "What's growing is fresh fruit. Fruit that's ready to eat is growing by leaps and bounds."
Canned pineapple production has dropped from 7 million cases annually 10 years ago to 4 million cases today, Schenk said. The goal is to trim production even further to 2.5 million cases annually.
He called the transition a "work in progress. You can't reduce an agricultural crop all at once. It's a gradual thing."
Maui Pine is planning to unveil some new products, but because of "competition issues," Schenk declined to elaborate.
He said employees were made aware of company plans and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union was given a three-month notice of the six layoffs, which involve janitorial and security positions. Still, some workers are uneasy with the changes, Schenk said.
"We're talking about a company that has been in business for almost 100 years," he said. "We're the last pineapple cannery in Hawai'i. We must recognize the changes in the marketplace and shift our business accordingly. If we fail to do that, then we will go out of business."
