By Helping Feed the Maui Community, This Local Foundation is also Spreading Aloha

I haven’t reached the 2025 Maui Music & Food Experience yet, but already I can hear the echo of “Paint It Black” reverberating through the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa. I ask myself if it’s still considered a cover of the Rolling Stones’ original song when Bernard Fowler—who’s the world-renowned rock band since 1989—is on stage performing it. He’s part of the new band Mongoose, along with Chicago-based musician Nicholas Tremulis, the festival’s music director, and Lahaina-born ʻukulele player Naiwi Teruya.

Teruya is also the lead artistic director and chef for the Hua Momona Foundation, working alongside Hua Momona Farms’ executive chef Zach Laidlaw. Both Laidlaw and Gary Grube, founder of the Hua Momona Farms and Foundation, express their admiration for Teruya’s talent both in the kitchen and onstage, calling him a living embodiment of the event’s purpose.

“Two things that bring people together: food and music,” Laidlaw says of the second annual Maui Music & Food Experience back in August. This year, the foundation’s biggest fundraiser brought in $200,000 to support Lahaina relief efforts.

The band mongoose performing at the Maui Music & Food Experience in August 2025.
Photo: Courtesy of Hua Momona/J. Anthony Martinez

The cause is close to Laidlaw’s heart, as he’s a survivor himself.

“I love Lahaina so much,” Laidlaw says. “I’ve only been here for about nine years, but Maui is my home.”

Laidlaw lost his house—right off Baker Street and Front Street—in the August 2023 fire. Since then, he’s used his platform on culinary competition shows like Gordon Ramsey’s “Next Level Chef” and Food Network’s “Chopped” to raise awareness about the struggles of Maui residents, especially fire survivors.

He has also leveraged his role at Hua Momona Farms to help feed the community. That effort has included discounted produce boxes he helped package and deliver across the island, as well as free meals that are still being distributed three times a week through the S-Turns resource hub. For nearly two years, Laidlaw and volunteers had served meals at Pōhaku Beach in Kahana, a spot referred to as S-Turns.

“In total, we gave away 24 tons of produce, which ain’t bad for a small farm,” Grube says. “It was like a drumbeat every week to keep doing it.”

This wouldn’t have been possible without the local volunteers who chopped vegetables, packaged meals and helped with distribution.

“We had people volunteering that had just lost their jobs, lost their home. They had nothing and they wanted to help somehow,” Grube says. “It was part of their journey to recovery.”

To date, the foundation has delivered 80,000 meals, and it still makes about 1,000 free hot meals every month.

“When we started our nonprofit back in 2020, that was our whole mission all along: getting people fed with nurturing food,” Laidlaw says.

The farm itself grows 25 varieties of microgreens, with Laidlaw favoring bold flavors like micro-dill, micro-basil and micro-cilantro. Other produce includes carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, kale, eggplant, daikon, spring mix, arugula, cilantro, rosemary, parsley, bergamot and mint, or as Laidlaw puts it, “All the herbs you can think of.”

Hua Momona Farms’ executive chef Zach Laidlaw.
Photo Courtesy: Hua Momona/J. Anthony Martinez

Hua Momona Farms now supplies 50 hotels, restaurants, food trucks and private chefs across Maui and Oʻahu. Laidlaw also collaborates with local purveyors when creating menus for the farm’s private events, which feature multicourse farm-to-table dinners with wine pairings by sommelier Richard Olson III.

“I think it’s important that we support our local fishermen and ranchers, all of our small farms,” Laidlaw says. “That’s keeping it in the community, that’s keeping it in our economy where the money should be staying.”

Beyond attending fundraisers like the Maui Music & Food Experience, locals and visitors alike can help tend the fields as part of a voluntourism opportunity, Mondays through Thursdays starting at 8 a.m. and lasting up to four hours. “Having 10 hands compared to four hands changes everything,” Laidlaw says.

Another way to give back is by donating to the Hua Momona Foundation, which helps fund the purchase of proteins for the free meals it still offers the Lahaina community.

The vision also extends beyond Maui. Supporters living on the U.S. mainland—or those willing to travel there—can still catch the Maui Music & Food Experience in Chicago on Nov. 7, 2025.

“We’re really excited about this multiyear, multicity campaign to bring aloha to the community here, but also to export some of that,” Grube says.

Hua Momona Farms, 246 Keoawa St., Lahaina, 808-862-6284, huamomonafarms.com.

Ashley Probst is a contributor to HAWAIʻI Magazine.