Pull up Yelp for Sugar's Hawaiʻi BBQ and Desserts right now and it will send you to the Target parking lot on Makala Boulevard. Check the Big Island Provisions website and you get the same address. Search the Kailua-Kona forum on Tripadvisor and more than one thread points you there too. None of that is where Food Truck Friday happens anymore, and it hasn't been for well over a year.
So where did it go, and why do so many of the businesses that actually run the thing seem not to have updated their own listings?
The short answer is that Food Truck Friday didn't shrink or quietly fade the way a lot of pop-up markets do when a host site pulls out. It got bigger. It went from every other Friday to every Friday. And it landed somewhere the online directories haven't caught up to yet. At the same time, a completely unrelated county program started letting individual food trucks park along a stretch of highway a few miles away, which means there are now two different food-truck stories unfolding in Kailua-Kona in the same stretch of months, and it's easy to mix them up if you're just trying to figure out where to get dinner.
What Actually Happened at Target
For two years, Food Truck Friday ran out of the Target parking lot on Makala Boulevard, organized by Catie Anderson, who owns Sugar's Hawaiʻi BBQ and Desserts. By mid-2025 it had grown to about 20 regular vendors and, in Anderson's words, become the biggest weekly event in Kona.
Then Target discontinued it. Anderson has said the decision came down to unsupervised teenagers who were reportedly destroying property inside the store, and the corporate location wasn't willing to keep hosting the gathering once that became a recurring problem. It's worth saying plainly that this wasn't a dispute between the market and its host. Anderson has described Food Truck Friday's two years at Target as a privilege, crediting the company with giving her vendors room to grow. The site just stopped working for reasons that had nothing to do with the food trucks themselves.
Losing a location that fast, for around 20 vendors who depend on the event for income, is the kind of thing that could have ended Food Truck Friday outright. Instead, Anderson called Hawaiʻi County Mayor Kimo Alameda directly.
The County's 90-Day Bridge
The county's Department of Parks and Recreation responded with a temporary fix: the south runway at Old Kona Airport Park, running every other Friday from 4 to 8 p.m., starting July 18 and continuing through September 26, 2025. It was explicitly a 90-day pilot, not a permanent home, and county officials framed it that way from the start.
Mayor Alameda's office said the goal was to buy time while a longer-term venue got sorted out. Parks and Recreation director Clayton Honma put it in terms of what the gathering does for the community, not just the vendors, saying these Food Truck Friday events let families and friends gather and strengthen social connections while supporting local food and craft businesses.
That framing matters. The county wasn't just solving a parking problem. It was treating a weekly food truck gathering as civic infrastructure worth protecting, the same way it might treat a park or a community center.
Where It Landed, and Grew
By mid-November 2025, Food Truck Friday had moved again, this time to the former K-mart parking lot on Kamakaeha Avenue next to Kona's Macy's. But this wasn't a lateral move. Reviews from the new location describe an "expanded" version of the event running every single Friday from 4 to 8 p.m., not every other week. As of the most recent Yelp listing for the event, that Kamakaeha Avenue address is still current.
The vendor list carried over from the Target and Old Kona Airport eras. Big Island Provisions, Califas Mexican Food, FOBʻs Polynesian Cuisine, Hāmākua Creations, Jillann's Caribbean Fusion, Lock Jaw Lemon Peel, Oyatsu-Sushi, and Piroshky were all named as regulars during the relocation period, alongside Luna's Vegan Eats. Reviews from the Kamakaeha Avenue location since the move add Wilson's Snack Shack, Cheese Please, and two separate Thai food trucks to the current rotation.
Here's the timeline in one place, since almost nothing online has all three stops listed together:
| Period | Location | Frequency | Why it moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 through mid-2025 | Target parking lot, Makala Boulevard | Weekly | Grew to roughly 20 vendors and became Kona's largest weekly gathering |
| July 18 to Sept. 26, 2025 | Old Kona Airport Park, south runway | Every other Friday | 90-day county pilot after Target ended its hosting |
| Nov. 2025 to present | Kamakaeha Avenue, former K-mart lot next to Macy's | Weekly (expanded) | Permanent-feeling home found once the pilot concluded |
The gap between what several vendor websites still say and what's actually true is a small but useful reminder that a business's own online listing is often the last thing that gets updated when a community event changes address twice in five months.
A Second Event Shares the Same Name
Food Truck Friday isn't a single trademarked gathering. A separate, unrelated Friday-afternoon food truck event, organized by Aloha Mobile Eats rather than Anderson, has run at HPM Building Supply on Luhia Street since 2021, with listings showing it continuing on that weekly schedule into January 2026. That version has run smaller, around 11 vendors including Pizza Rovers and Sweet Life Kona, and it operates independently of the Anderson-organized gathering that moved through Target, Old Kona Airport, and now Kamakaeha Avenue.
If you've ever gotten conflicting directions from two neighbors about where Food Truck Friday is, this is probably why. There are, and have been for years, two different Friday food truck gatherings in Kailua-Kona with the same informal name.
The Highway Corridor Is a Different Story Entirely
Around the same time Food Truck Friday was relocating, the Hawaiʻi County Council took up a separate question: where can individual food trucks legally park along county roads at all. In October 2024, the council passed Bill 184, which lets vendors apply for permits to conduct temporary commercial activity at designated spots along county streets for up to a year. In March 2025, the council designated its first such spot: the ocean side of Ane Keohokālole Highway, between the West Hawaiʻi Civic Center and the Allied Quarry access road.
County officials framed this as catching up to reality. Department of Public Works testimony noted that commercial vending was already happening along that highway and others without any legal path to a permit, and that having a designated, permitted area would ease pressure on a police force with limited capacity to enforce against it.
This program has nothing to do with Food Truck Friday. It doesn't run on a set schedule, it isn't organized by Anderson or Aloha Mobile Eats, and it applies to individual vendors seeking their own permits rather than a coordinated weekly market. But it drew real opposition, and the opposition is worth understanding if you walk or bike that corridor.
"It was an honor to create the first exercise corridor for the community, and after all the work, it was not meant to be a strip mall."
That's Laura Mallery-Sayre, co-founder of the Sayre Foundation, testifying against the bill. She and her husband Frank worked with People for Active Transportation Hawaiʻi to establish the Queens' Lei Trail Path, a 6.75-mile loop along both sides of Ane Keohokālole Highway completed in 2016 after what she described as 40 years of community effort. Her concern wasn't about food trucks generally. It was that a stretch of road built specifically for pedestrians and cyclists was being opened to commercial vending without the input of the people who built it.
Councilmember Rebecca Villegas voted against the measure, arguing that existing shopping centers already offered space for mobile vendors. Councilmember Jenn Kagiwada initially supported it, then reversed her position after hearing the Sayres' testimony, saying she wanted more time to gather community input before moving forward.
The corridor was designated anyway, with the county committing to signage and enforcement to keep vendors clear of the highway shoulder and the trail path itself. Individual daily operating hours were still being worked out at the time the pilot was approved.
Two Threads, One Season
None of this changes what's true right now for anyone planning a Friday night. Food Truck Friday, the weekly gathering with the deepest roots and the biggest vendor list, is on Kamakaeha Avenue next to Macy's, every Friday from 4 to 8 p.m. A second, smaller version under the same name has run at HPM Building Supply on Luhia Street. And if you notice food trucks parked along Ane Keohokālole Highway near the Civic Center, that's a separate, permit-based program with no fixed schedule, sitting on a road that a lot of Kona residents spent decades turning into a walking and biking corridor before it became anything else.
The overlap in timing between the market's relocation and the highway program's rollout is coincidental. But it's the reason a search for "Food Truck Friday Kona" in 2026 can turn up an old Target address, a Luhia Street event, and a highway shoulder that has nothing to do with any of it. Knowing which thread you're actually looking at is the difference between a wasted Friday drive and a plate of Wilson's fish and chips.
Kris Hazard keeps closer tabs on North Kona's small moving pieces than most search results do, whether that's a food truck's third address in a year or a zoning change on a road you walk every week. If there's a corner of the neighborhood you'd like the real story on, reach out and start the conversation.
