Hawaii County Hawaii Puna Breadfruit Festival

On the grounds of a small public charter school in the Puna district of Hawai’i Island, a community gathering once placed a single traditional crop at the center of an entire day. The event was published as the Puna ‘Ulu Festival, taking its name from ‘ulu, the Hawaiian word for breadfruit, and the English title above is a rendering of that published name rather than a name the festival itself ever carried in print. A report from the organiser network describes the gathering of Saturday, March 3, 2012 as the first Puna ‘Ulu Festival, and a printed programme documents a second edition one year later, on Saturday, March 2, 2013, running from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. beneath the theme ‘Ulu a me Niu — Celebrating Breadfruit and Coconut! Nothing later than that second edition appears in any organiser, destination, news or listing layer gathered here, so this article treats the festival as a documented piece of 2012 and 2013, never as a celebration still running today.

About the Festival

The published name comes in two unmerged forms. Newsletters circulated by the organiser network in March and April of 2012 call the event the Puna ‘Ulu Festival, and the printed programme for the 2013 edition uses that same form, while the network’s own events listing for March 2012 expands it slightly to Puna ‘Ulu (Breadfruit) Festival. Who stood behind the day is likewise recorded in pieces that this article declines to fuse into a single credit. The 2013 programme is presented by Ho’oulu Lāhui and Kua O Ka Lā NCPCS, printed exactly as the programme prints it, whereas a report on the 2012 gathering describes the festival as taking place at Ho’oulu Lāhui, identified there as the site of Kua O Ka Lā Public Charter School. The Hawai’i Homegrown Food Network reported on the festival and promoted it through its newsletters, a reporting and promoting role that falls short of an organiser credit, and no source gathered names one merged organising body.

The setting matters as much as the billing. Both documented editions unfolded on the campus of Kua O Ka Lā Public Charter School at Pū’āla’a, beside ‘Āhalanui County Park, in the rural Puna district on the eastern side of Hawai’i Island. Puna is a district, not a town and not a seat of government, and the county seat of Hawai’i County is Hilo, a fact worth stating plainly because this festival never took place in Hilo at all. No street address for the campus appears in any source gathered, and none is supplied here.

Quick Facts

Item	Detail
Published name	Puna ‘Ulu Festival, also listed as Puna ‘Ulu (Breadfruit) Festival
Venue	Kua O Ka Lā Public Charter School campus, Pū’āla’a, beside ‘Āhalanui County Park
District and county	Puna district, Hawai’i County, whose county seat is Hilo
Presented by, per the 2013 programme	Ho’oulu Lāhui and Kua O Ka Lā NCPCS
First documented edition	Saturday, March 3, 2012
Second documented edition	Saturday, March 2, 2013, 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Theme in 2013	‘Ulu a me Niu — Celebrating Breadfruit and Coconut!
Admission	No entry price published in any layer gathered
Reported crowd for 2012	About one thousand two hundred people in the organiser network’s report
Editions after 2013	None documented in any layer gathered

History

The beginning rests on a single plain statement. Reporting after the event, the organiser network’s April 2012 newsletter calls the gathering of March 3, 2012 “The first Puna ‘Ulu Festival,” and this article records that first edition exactly as the layer states it. No annual numbering attaches to either documented edition, so no billing exists from which a longer pedigree could be calculated, and none is invented. The 2012 report places the day at Ho’oulu Lāhui, on the school site at Pū’āla’a, and remembers a cooking contest whose Best of Show honour, according to a magazine layer, went to the Pūnana Cookie. That same network report says the first festival was attended by about one thousand two hundred people, although the headline above its own account says over one thousand; both figures belong to that one layer, they describe 2012 only, and they amount to a reported crowd rather than a counted gate.

A year later the festival returned with paperwork. The printed programme for Saturday, March 2, 2013 names Ho’oulu Lāhui and Kua O Ka Lā NCPCS as presenters, fixes the hours from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and gives the day its bilingual theme of breadfruit and coconut. After that programme, the record closes. No edition later than 2013 surfaces in an organiser publication, a destination guide, a news report or an events listing among the sources gathered, and the sources offer no reason for the silence, so none is guessed at here. Whatever hopes surrounded the first two editions, the documentary trail ends in March 2013.

For a useful comparison, see the Hawaii County Hawaii Big Island Chocolate Festival for another county festival.

What to Expect

The fullest picture of the day comes from the printed 2013 programme, supplemented by the report on 2012, and the elements belong to those layers rather than to any standing promise. The programme opens with a pule, a prayer, before moving into the day’s activities. A music tent carried the sound of the gathering, while cooking demonstrations led by chefs and by kūpuna, the elders, showed what could be done with ‘ulu and with coconut in practiced hands. A cooking and recipe contest invited entries built around the crop, and the eating was central: an ‘ulu sampler plate offered for tasting, and a buffet lunch composed of breadfruit and coconut dishes. Talks ranged across traditional knowledge and reached as far as Kalu’ulu, the ancient breadfruit grove on the Kona side of the island, and the programme included the planting of an ‘ulu tree to commemorate the event itself.

One tempting detail is deliberately withheld. Readers who have encountered accounts of breadfruit tree sales at a Hawai’i breadfruit festival are reading about the Kona editions discussed further below, because the tree-sale detail is documented for those gatherings and not for Puna. No sale of trees is claimed for the Puna ‘Ulu Festival anywhere in this article. The sampler plate, finally, was listed in the 2013 programme as available by donation, which describes a way of paying for a tasting plate and nothing more; it was never an admission arrangement, and it cannot be stretched into an entry policy for the festival as a whole.

Planning Your Visit

Candour has to come before logistics: there is no announced edition of this festival to plan around. The documented record closes with the programme of March 2, 2013, and no organiser, destination, news or listing layer gathered for this article carries any later date, so a trip built on the expectation of attending would rest on nothing firmer than hope. Anyone researching the event should therefore treat the 2012 and 2013 material as history, valuable for understanding what the festival was, and should look for a fresh announcement from the Puna community before assuming the gathering has resumed in any form.

What the historical record does supply is the shape a visit took. Both editions fell on early-March Saturdays, the 2013 day ran a compact six hours from morning into mid-afternoon, and the ground was a school campus in Pū’āla’a with a county park next door rather than a fairground or a resort. On money, the record is equally plain in both directions: no admission price is published in any layer gathered, and no layer declares the festival free, so neither a price nor free entry can honestly be asserted. The one money detail in print is the by-donation sampler plate of 2013, a food item already fenced above.

A Sample Day Itinerary

The itinerary below reconstructs the documented shape of Saturday, March 2, 2013, and it is labelled as that historical edition’s pattern rather than offered as a current schedule. A visitor that morning would have arrived at the school campus in Pū’āla’a in time for the opening pule at 9:00 a.m., then drifted toward the cooking demonstrations to watch chefs and kūpuna work through breadfruit and coconut preparations. Late morning belonged to the recipe contest entries and a first pass at the sampler plate, with the buffet lunch of breadfruit and coconut dishes anchoring the middle of the day. The afternoon hours left room for the talks on traditional knowledge and on the grove at Kalu’ulu, a return to the music tent, and the commemorative planting of an ‘ulu tree before the programme wound down at 3:00 p.m.

How It Compares

Several other breadfruit gatherings share vocabulary with this one without sharing its identity. The Kona Breadfruit Festival met at the Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in Kealakekua, in South Kona, on September 24 in both 2011 and 2012, under Ho’oulu ka ‘Ulu partners, which makes it a different festival in a different district clear across the island, and its documented tree sales belong to its record alone. On Maui, the event called Lā ‘Ulu, or Breadfruit Day, at Maui Nui Botanical Gardens is another separate occasion on another island. Later still, the ‘Ulu Ho’olaule’a & Global Breadfruit Summit gathered in Kona across September 19 to 24, 2026, a contemporary event whose existence demonstrates continuing interest in the crop while saying nothing whatsoever about whether the Puna festival ever resumed. None of these gatherings lends the Puna ‘Ulu Festival its dates, its programme or its currency.

A Visit Checklist

• Read the name correctly: the published festival is the Puna ‘Ulu Festival, and ‘ulu means breadfruit.
• Check the status first, because no edition after March 2013 is documented anywhere gathered here.
• Expect no announced date, no published admission price and no promise of free entry in the record.
• Picture the setting as a charter school campus at Pū’āla’a beside ‘Āhalanui County Park, not a fairground.
• Remember that Hilo is the county seat and that this festival never took place there.
• Keep the by-donation sampler plate in its place as a 2013 food item, never as an entry policy.
• Do not expect tree sales, which are documented for the Kona festival and not for this one.
• Use the 2013 programme’s hours, 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., as history rather than as a timetable.

Beyond the Festival

The ground itself explains part of the festival’s character. A public charter school rooted in its community gave the gathering its home, and the county park next door placed the day within the everyday landscape of Puna rather than inside a ticketed venue built for tourists. Even the programme looked outward from that small campus: one of its talks carried listeners across the island to Kalu’ulu, the ancient Kona breadfruit grove, tying a young Puna celebration to centuries of cultivation knowledge held elsewhere on Hawai’i Island. The wider ‘ulu revival that later produced gatherings such as the 2026 Kona summit grew from the same soil of interest, although those connections are thematic and confer no shared history on the events themselves.

Why It Matters

Small as its documented life was, the Puna ‘Ulu Festival packed an unusual amount into two March Saturdays. It put kūpuna on the demonstration ground as teachers, treated a canoe-era staple crop as worthy of contests, scholarship and ceremony, and drew a reported crowd of about one thousand two hundred people to a school campus in its first year, if the organiser network’s figure is credited as the report it is. A festival created to celebrate breadfruit in the district where the host school stood also served as a statement about food rooted in place, and the printed care of the 2013 programme shows organisers who expected the day to be remembered. That the record then stops is part of its significance too, a reminder that community festivals can burn brightly across a couple of editions and still leave only a thin file behind.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Puna ‘Ulu Festival still being held today?

Nothing gathered for this article documents an edition after Saturday, March 2, 2013, and no organiser, destination, news or listing layer carries a later date or a fresh announcement. The honest answer is that the festival is not documented as continuing, and it should not be described as a current annual event.

Why does the headline use an English name the festival never published?

Because the sheet behind this series renders titles in English, while the event itself appeared in print only as the Puna ‘Ulu Festival, or in one listing as the Puna ‘Ulu (Breadfruit) Festival. Since ‘ulu is simply the Hawaiian word for breadfruit, the English headline translates the published name, and the published name is the one this article anchors on throughout.

Did visitors have to pay anything at the gate?

No admission price is published in any layer gathered, and no layer states that entry was free, so the record supports neither a price nor a free-entry claim. The single money detail in print, the ‘ulu sampler plate offered by donation in the 2013 programme, concerned a tasting plate and was never presented as a charge for walking in.

Were young breadfruit trees really sold at this festival?

Not in any source gathered for Puna. Tree sales are documented for the Kona Breadfruit Festival editions of 2011 and 2012 at the botanical garden in Kealakekua, and that detail belongs to the Kona record, so it is expressly not claimed for the Puna ‘Ulu Festival here.

What to Expect From the Next Hawaii County Hawaii Puna Breadfruit Festival

How often is Hawaii County Hawaii Puna Breadfruit Festival held?

The record shows two editions in two successive years, on March 3, 2012 and March 2, 2013, and then nothing further in any layer gathered. Two editions establish that the festival happened twice in early March; they do not establish a continuing yearly rhythm, and this article does not describe the event as an annual fixture.

When is the next Hawaii County Hawaii Puna Breadfruit Festival?

No next edition is announced in any source gathered, and no date after March 2, 2013 exists in the record to report. A future edition would begin with an announcement from the community that presented the first two, and until such an announcement appears there is no date to give.

Will the dates change?

There are no future dates in the record that could change, because no edition beyond 2013 has been documented or announced anywhere gathered here. Should the festival ever return, its organisers would set the day themselves, and the early-March Saturdays of 2012 and 2013 would be a precedent rather than a commitment.

What survives of the Puna ‘Ulu Festival is a compact, well-printed trail: a stated first edition, one full programme, and a theme that joined breadfruit and coconut in a single celebration on a school campus in Pū’āla’a. Read on those terms, the record needs no embellishment, and this account has tried to leave it exactly as complete, and exactly as unfinished, as the sources leave it.