farming cacao

When we started planting cacao on Oahu in 2009 there was very little local expertise on cacao farming in Hawaii. Unsure of what types of cacao would ultimately prove the most successful, both in terms of viability and flavor, we began our seedling orchard from cacao around the Hawaiian islands. Since then we have continued to refine our orchards, slowly incorporating more and more grafted trees to clarify our diverse planting. Our farm straddles the 21st parallel, and that extreme condition (from cacao’s point of view) as well as many other more immediate climate, soil and topographical issues have all influenced how we farm cacao.

Educating people WHERE chocolate comes from (a tree and not a shelf) and what it tastes like from different farms and countries is all part of our dream. We hope to shed some light on how this food can be a viable new agricultural crop for Hawaii. We have formed great friendships with others on the islands that hold similar interests, and together we all hope in the decades to come visitors and consumers world-wide will associate Hawaii with world-class chocolate.

Here below are a few of the steps to growing chocolate and how we do things at Lonohana.

HARVEST

Just like any other food product, you can’t make great chocolate without great ingredients, in our case cacao beans. And those beans have to be harvested exactly at the moment of peek ripeness in order to capture their full potential. Our harvest varies in pace throughout the year, and so we have to be ready for whatever mother nature has in store.

After picking, every pod is cracked by hand in order to extract the roughly 30-40 beans per pod that are held together as a clump by sweet white fruit pulp.

FERMENTATION

Fermentation is without a doubt the single most important step in the entire chocolate making process

We ferment exclusively in mahogany wooden boxes. Each box can hold 200-250 kilograms of wet seed, which suits our production and harvest levels perfectly.

Fermentation serves as a critical step in the cacao seed’s evolution. Essentially, it represents its death, at least in its current form. The alcohol, acidity and temperature of the natural fermentation liberates precursor compounds in the seed so that they can be catalyzed later in the factory during the roast.

SUN DRYING

The final step before leaving the farm is to spread out the wet fermented beans onto drying racks. Over a period of 10-14 days, depending on the outside temperature and weather, we carefully rotate the beans on the racks until they are completely dried out and extremely little moisture is left inside. This ensures that the beans will be safe to travel and remain dried out and ready for chocolate making in the months to follow.