Wailua Meat Co.

Since 1964

About Wailua Meat Co.

The story of Wailua Meat Company begins in 1936 along the lush, sun kissed slopes of legendary Sleeping Giant. Manuel Sanchez, a young, second generation sugar cane farmer, saw something special in his family’s sixty-acre parcel of land in Wailua Valley: the perfect place to raise cattle. It was here that Manuel established his first herd, which soon grew, and along with it, his family. In 1945, the Sanchez’s built one of Kauai’s earliest commercial slaughterhouses; that same year, their son William Joseph Sanchez was born. “Willy”, as everyone knows him, filled his father’s boots early on, working the pastures during his youth, mending fences in the summer.

After Willy graduated from Kapaa High School, he served in the US Army for four years and returned to Kauai in 1966. Two years later, at the age of 23, he had his own head of cattle on an additional 50 acres near the Kapaa Poi Factory. Like his father’s before him, the herd grew, and along with it, the family business. In 1969 Willy took over the management and production of the original slaughterhouse— one of only two slaughterhouses still active on Kauai—and expanded his family’s pastureland to accommodate the growing demand for his grass-finished beef. Today, Wailua Meat Co. manages a full-scale, state-of-the-art processing facility with more than 500 head of cattle across 1,326 acres of paradise pastureland. For Willy, a Kauai-born cattle rancher, Wailua Meat Co. is a dream come true. You can still find him mending fences and tending the pastures his father established more than 80 years ago, while faithfully producing the finest grass-finished beef in the business.