KAUAI TODAY
There are two kinds of people on Kauai: people eating a Spam musubi, and people about ten minutes away from eating a Spam musubi. That warm brick of rice, teriyaki-glazed Spam, and nori is breakfast, beach snack, plate-lunch sidekick, and 9 PM gas-station salvation all in one. But here's the part a lot of visitors — and even some locals — don't know: the Spam musubi wasn't invented in Honolulu. It was invented here on Kauai.
How Spam got to Hawaii
Hormel introduced Spam on the mainland in 1937, but it was World War II that brought it to the islands. Fresh meat was scarce and hard to ship; canned meat wasn't. GIs stationed across the Pacific ate it by the crate, and it flowed into local markets and plantation lunch pails, where it fit right into a lunch culture built around rice and whatever protein kept in the heat. When the war ended, Spam didn't leave. It got teriyaki glaze, it got fried with eggs and rice for breakfast, and it became comfort food.
Today Hawaii eats around seven million cans a year — the highest per-capita Spam consumption in the United States. It's on the menu at McDonald's here, Waikiki throws an annual Spam Jam street festival for it, and August 8 (8/08) is celebrated as National Spam Musubi Day.
The Kauai invention
Sometime in the early 1980s, Barbara Funamura — a Kauai food scientist who ran Joni-Hana at Kukui Grove Center in Lihue — started selling a block of rice topped with a slice of Spam and wrapped in nori. Her first version was triangular; the now-familiar rectangle came when she switched to pressing them in a box, the shape every musubi maker on the island still uses. From a food counter in a Lihue shopping center, the idea spread across the state and then everywhere Hawaii people went. (Honolulu has a competing origin story — Mitsuko Kaneshiro, who sold hundreds a day from City Pharmacy — but on Kauai we know whose island the musubi calls home.) Funamura passed away in 2016, and her invention outlives her on every counter on this island.
Where to get one on Kauai today
The Musubi Truck
The island's musubi specialists — the classic done right, plus elevated builds with poke, katsu, and more. What started as a Kapaa food truck now has three spots: Kapaa (4548 Kukui St), Koloa (3450 Poipu Rd), and Kalapaki in Lihue. If you want to taste how far the humble musubi can go, start here.
Pono Market
An old-school Kapaa institution. Get there in the morning, grab a musubi (or three) from the counter alongside their poke and plate lunches, and you're eating the same way locals have for generations.
ABC Stores
The unsung hero of the visitor musubi. Every ABC Store keeps musubi ready to go by the register — it's the easiest possible on-ramp: beach towel in one hand, musubi in the other. No trip to the islands is complete without at least one ABC Store musubi eaten in a parking lot with an ocean view.
McDonald's
You can even get Spam with your breakfast on Kauai Today at the ol Golden Arches.
More local counters
- The Fish Express (Lihue) — poke shop musubi, right by the airport for a last-chance goodbye.
- Mark's Place (Puhi) — local-style plates and grab-and-go, musubi included.
- Honestly: almost any grocery counter or gas station on the island. The beauty of the musubi is that the floor is high — even the humble hot-case one hits the spot.
The takeaway
Seventy-plus years after Spam landed with the troops, and forty-some years after Barbara Funamura pressed the first one in Lihue, the Spam musubi is still the island's most democratic food: a couple of bucks, no fork needed, good warm or at room temperature, better at the beach. Eat one for history. Eat two because they're small.