The Billionaire Family Behind King's Hawaiian

Taking over his father's business in the 1980s, Mark Taira grew a small local bakery into a $2 billion fortune. As the third generation takes over, he's looking for more acquisitions.

The sweet smell of baking bread swirls sugar and butter notes in the air of the King’s Hawaiian factory in Torrance, California, a town of 140,000 just south of Los Angeles.  Mark Taira, the 67-year-old son of the bakery’s founder and its CEO since 1983, pauses the factory tour to take in the scent as he adjusts to the loud hum of conveyor belts, grinding gears, and bread-kneading machines.  

Fresh off the line is Taira’s favorite way to eat his family’s famous rolls, and there is plenty to choose from Every hour, 13,000 pounds of King’s Hawaiian bread are baked at this plant, six days a week.  In addition, King’s Hawaiian has a much larger operation in Georgia that serves the East Coast. 

Those signature buns generate around 85% of the $900 million in annual revenue that Taira’s food empire brings in—the rest is from condiments and beverages—with well over 40% gross profit margins, according to Forbes’ estimates.  (Taira claims the company operates with a rela­tively low debt-to-Ebitda ratio—as low as 1. 5 times, which he claims is about half of most industry competitors.) 

It’s an impressive haul for the food industry, where gross margins typically hover around 30%, especially considering the King’s Hawaiian recipe calls for 12 key ingredients—three times as many as other breads—some of which the company will source only from the original suppliers in the Aloha State.  

Through King’s Hawaiian, the Taira family has written a classic American success story. Over the last two decades, King’s Hawaiian revenue has risen 15-fold, and the modest family business has evolved into an acquisition-hungry home for emerging brands. Under the holding company Irresistible Food Group, which was formed in 2021, the Taira family now sells Hawaiian-farmed tea and the classic bun complement: pickles. 

Today, King’s Hawaiian is the envy of many grocers, competitors, and investors. The brand comes up “all the time in our meetings,” says Wayne Wu, general partner at VMG, a San Francisco–based venture and private equity shop with a large food portfolio, “as an iconic brand that we look at and say, ‘I hope we can find a brand to invest in like a King’s  ’ ”

The famous 12-pack of rolls is the second-most-sold item across all American grocery stores during Thanksgiving and Christmas, the two biggest holiday spending periods of the year.  During Easter ham season, King’s Hawaiian rolls are America’s third-best seller, after Land O Lakes butter and Coke. King’s Hawaiian is eyeing events like the Super Bowl—he wants “Slider Sunday” to be the new Taco Tuesday—as well as grilling holidays like the Fourth of July and Labor Day.  

Customers buy rolls all year: A decade ago, some 60% of King’s Hawaiian’s annual sales came from Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. The story of King’s Hawaiian began on a sugar plantation on Hawaii’s Big Island decades before statehood in 1959. There, Robert Taira grew up the sixth of nine children born to immigrants from Okinawa, Japan, who came to work the sugarcane fields in 1906.

King’s became the Honolulu Post Office’s top customer, shipping tens of thousands of loaves a year. Aiming to lower transportation costs, Robert and his wife, Tsuneko, mortgaged the family home to build a bakery just outside Los Angeles. 

That constituted progress, but the brand didn’t really catch on until Robert and Mark made a fundamental change to their signature product—ditching full loaves for shareable rolls.  When Mark became CEO later that year, he soon decided to take another risk: Move out of Hawaii and close the Honolulu bake shop. Hungry for more, Taira pushed the family business east to Georgia.

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