Our History

Harold Tanouye, President of Green Point Nurseries, started in the flower business when he returned to Hawai‘i from college. It was 1957, and Hilo ’s economy had not yet recovered from the impact of WWII. People were moving away.

But Harold wanted to live in his hometown and he needed work. He recognized a demand for anthuriums, which military personnel had sent home to parents and girlfriends during the war, and which people were still shipping via airmail and special delivery.

Growing anthuriums in Hilo was only a part-time, backyard-type cottage industry then. “I decided I wanted to do it as a business,” he says. “I engaged myself. And now it’s been 42 years.”

Our Family

Eric Tanouye, the company’s vice president, is Harold’s son, and he brought his marketing background to Green Point Nurseries in 1977.

Harold and Eric are the third and fourth generations of the Tanouye family to farm in Hawai‘i.

“On our watch over the next 40 years,” says Eric, “it is our intent to improve what we do so this business can continue to grow and thrive through future generations.”

Consistency of Quality

Harold remembers decades ago when a group of Mainland wholesalers toured the farm, and then told him that the reason they decided to buy from Green Point was because the farm was so neat and clean.

We still maintain a very clean environment on our farm, and that’s only one aspect of our insistence on quality.

• We also focus strongly on our Customer Service; for example, we arrange our shipping schedule not for our convenience but for the convenience of our customers.

• We are founding members of the state Department of Agriculture’s Seal of Quality program, which has exacting standards for its farmer members.

• We take leadership positions in trade and flower associations.

• We lobby for issues relating to the flower business in Hawai‘i.

Innovation

At Green Point Nurseries, we don’t sit back. We are innovators.

It was Harold who came up with the hermetically sealed, gusseted polyethylene bag inside the carton, which changed how flowers are shipped and is now the industry standard. At Green Point, we were among the first to put up large shade houses for growing. We were the first at large-scale use of cinder as growing material, and to start irrigating here in Hilo .

“We have made it because of innovation,” says Harold. “We won’t be here for very long unless we continue innovating.”

Sustainability

Eric studied how the ancient Hawaiians farmed these lands before us in an agricultural leadership class he once took at the University of Hawai'i .

“They came to an understanding of how to sustain balance,” he says. “How the rain fell down from the sky in the mountains, the rainforest area; how the water went to the streams, how it collected. They farmed in terms of what grew best where, and they protected their resources.”

These are lessons we live by at Green Point Nurseries. “If we don’t have balance when we do business, and in how we do our business,” says Eric, “we aren’t going to be able to sustain ourselves—the environment, the crops we produce, the employees, the business.”

Harold sums it all up by noting that he lives here and his grandchildren live here. Every decision we make at the farm takes this into consideration.