Ask a Kailua resident where the farmers market is and you'll get three different answers, all confident, all correct. One person will send you to a parking lot near Adventist Health Castle Hospital on Sunday morning. Another will point you toward a covered lot on Uluniu Street, a block from Manoa Chocolate. A third will tell you Thursday evening, Kailua Town Center, next to Longs and the UFC Gym. None of them are wrong. They're just describing three separate markets that happen to share a name people keep shortening to "the farmers market," and the confusion is common enough that it's become its own recurring question in local travel forums.
The interesting part isn't that Kailua has three markets. Plenty of towns this size do. It's that they didn't arrive at the same time or for the same reason. One of them got pushed out of downtown Kailua twice before landing where it is now, and that displacement is exactly why the other two had room to grow into different roles. If you understand the history, you stop treating the three markets as redundant options and start treating them as three different tools, each suited to a different Sunday or Thursday errand.
The market that keeps getting moved
The oldest of the three, generally called the Kailua Town Farmers' Market, spent more than six years setting up in the Kailua Elementary School parking lot before the school's principal asked it to leave in 2019. It found a temporary home in the Pali Lanes bowling alley parking lot that same summer, under a canopy of monkeypod trees on Hekili Street, in a deal that was only supposed to last four months. It ended up staying closer to two years.
Then Pali Lanes closed for good after more than 60 years in business, and Alexander & Baldwin, the property owner, didn't renew the lease. The market's director spent weeks lining up a new site and eventually relocated the Sunday market to the Kailua Cinemas parking lot at Enchanted Lake Center in the summer of 2021, with a formal grand opening that July. Today the Sunday market runs from 8 a.m. to noon several blocks from that original downtown footprint, at 640 Ulukahiki Street, east of Adventist Health Castle Hospital. It's still the market most oriented toward actual produce: family farms selling Asian greens and herbs, sweet corn, fresh-squeezed lemonade, and the kind of weekly grocery run that rewards showing up before 9 a.m., since the good stuff sells out.
Each move pushed this market a little farther from the geographic center of town. That's not a criticism of anyone involved. Leases end, landowners change plans, schools need their parking lots back. But it explains why "the farmers market" isn't one fixed point in Kailua anymore. It's a market that had to keep finding new ground, and downtown Kailua filled in behind it.
What grew in the space it left
While the original market was relocating twice in two years, Lōkahi Kailua Market took root much closer to the town center, on Uluniu Street near Manoa Chocolate Café & Wine Bar. Founded by Michelle Horton, it runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in a covered lot that stays dry on rainy mornings, which is a genuine advantage on the windward side.
Lōkahi leans artisan and social rather than produce-first. Expect Birria tacos, Filipino sweets, handmade jewelry, and live music, with a free keiki corner that makes it an easier stop with kids than a market built around hauling home a week's worth of vegetables. It's pet-friendly, and the same Uluniu Street lot also hosts the separate Aloha Home Market on different days, which adds one more name to keep straight if you're cross-referencing event listings.
The two Sunday markets aren't competing for the same errand. One is where you go to restock the kitchen. The other is where you go to spend an unhurried hour, eat something you didn't plan on, and maybe walk away with a candle or a piece of art. Locals who treat them as interchangeable usually end up disappointed at one or the other, expecting produce at Lōkahi or expecting a browsing crowd at Ulukahiki Street.
The Thursday option nobody has to choose between
The third market solves a different problem entirely: what to do about dinner on a Thursday without driving anywhere. The Kailua Farmers' Market, run by the Hawaii Farm Bureau, sets up Thursdays from 5 to 7:30 p.m. in the Kailua Town Center parking lot, right next to Longs Drugs and the UFC Gym. It began its current weekly run in February 2026 and stays open through the year, including holiday weeks, since the Farm Bureau has confirmed its Oahu markets remain open even when the organization's state office closes for observances like the Fourth of July.
The vendor lineup reads like a plate-lunch counter crossed with a produce stand: seared ahi with shiitake mushrooms, imu-style kalua pork, garlic shrimp, and a beef chili from North Shore Cattle Co., alongside a family farm's Asian greens, handmade salsas built around Kailua-grown ghost peppers, and crepes made to order. One vendor, Grandma G's, serves local-style dinner plates at this Thursday market and a separate breakfast spread at another Kailua market on Sunday mornings, which is a small but telling detail. The same small businesses are stitching together a living across more than one of these markets, which is part of why the lineups feel connected even when the locations don't overlap.
Here's a quick reference for sorting out which is which:
| Market | Day & Hours | Location | What it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kailua Farmers' Market (Hawaii Farm Bureau) | Thursdays, 5–7:30 p.m. | Kailua Town Center, next to Longs and UFC Gym | Grab-and-go dinner plates, weekday produce |
| Kailua Town Farmers' Market | Sundays, 8 a.m.–noon | 640 Ulukahiki St, near Adventist Health Castle Hospital | Serious produce, weekly grocery restock |
| Lōkahi Kailua Market | Sundays, 9 a.m.–1 p.m. | 340 Uluniu St, near Manoa Chocolate | Crafts, food vendors, live music, family hangout |
Why this matters more than it looks like it should
None of this is really about farmers markets. It's about how a small town's commercial geography shifts when one anchor gets displaced. Kailua's original Sunday market lost its downtown parking lot twice in eight years, first to a school reclaiming its own space, then to a 60-year-old bowling alley closing for good. Each time, the market survived by moving outward, toward Castle Hospital, away from the walkable core. That created an opening downtown, and Lōkahi filled it with a different kind of Sunday morning, one built around crafts and live music instead of crates of produce. The Thursday market solved a third need on a completely different day, inside the same town center that anchors the whole west end of Kailua Road.
If you've lived in Kailua for a while, you've probably pieced most of this together already, one relocation notice or Facebook post at a time. If you're newer to the neighborhood, or you've just been going to whichever market you stumbled into first, it's worth treating all three as separate stops rather than picking a favorite and assuming the others are the same thing under a different name. Thursday evening solves dinner. Sunday morning on Ulukahiki Street solves groceries. Sunday morning on Uluniu Street solves everything else, from an hour of live music to a jar of local honey you didn't know you needed.
That's the actual throughline. Kailua didn't end up with three markets by accident or by oversaturation. It ended up with three markets because one of them kept getting moved, and the town built something different in the space it left behind each time.
Kailua's small business scene tells you a lot about how the town actually functions day to day, which is exactly the kind of detail worth knowing before you buy here, not after. If you're weighing a move to Kailua or thinking about what your home might be worth in this market, Fran Magbual can walk you through both the numbers and the neighborhood. Reach out for a free home valuation or a no-pressure consultation.