East West Marketing Imports Filipino Food Products with the “Taste of Home”

2024 SmallBiz Editor’s Choice Award winner: Melody Calisay started selling dry foods from her car to support her doctoral studies. It’s now a $4 million business.

Melody Calisay started importing Filipino food products because of her family.

“I want to help my family in the Philippines,” she says. And by importing food products, “I can help them make money.”

Calisay grew up poor and says her parents couldn’t afford to send her to her top-choice colleges. Instead, she attended the University of the Philippines, where then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos was offering students free tuition.

“I didn’t have a choice,” says Calisay. “It was the work ethic, the commitment that I really needed to finish because I am the eldest of seven.”

After graduating, she worked for Dole Philippines for 10 years and earned her master’s degree. Calisay says she led a laboratory at Dole but was stereotyped because she was a single woman. Wanting a change, she applied to UH Mānoa for her doctorate and got accepted.

She started East West Marketing in 1998 while working on her soil science and agronomy degree. At first, Calisay says, she was selling Philippine products “from the trunk of my car” as a side gig. She struggled because she did not have business experience and banks told her she did not qualify for loans.

“They said import is a very risky business and a lot of people who went in the import business failed,” Calisay says.

There were also legal challenges because the U.S. restricts what can be imported from a foreign country.

But, after borrowing money from friends, her business eventually took off: Now, Calisay has a small warehouse in Kalihi and manages nine workers in Hawai‘i and an affiliated business in the Philippines that supplies the products and occasionally seeks out new ones.

For years, she ran the business while working full time as a brownfields coordinator and remedial project manager, but she retired from that state job in 2020.

Last year, East West Marketing marked its 25th year in business with $3.98 million in gross revenue and is on track to earn $4.2 million this year.

Calisay says East West Marketing supplies wholesale Filipino dry food products to small businesses across the Hawaiian Islands, with 90% of those businesses owned by women. Her best-known clients are Seafood City and Pacific Supermarket in Waipahu.

Calisay says she likes giving “people the taste of home.”

“Filipinos are very loyal to the food that they’re eating,” she says. “I want to provide the services for them … so they will not miss the Philippines.”