Hawaii Cocoa

Cocoa is one of several Hawaiian products grown nowhere else in the U-S. It’s also the main ingredient in almost everyone’s favorite addiction: chocolate.

Pat McConahay visited a place known as Hawaii’s "Original Chocolate Factory." It’s a farm business where visitors can see the entire process — from planting to harvest, bean to bar!

You can hear the dry leaves crackle beneath Bob Cooper’s feet as he steps into his Cacao orchard to begin the morning harvest, clipping these oblong pods from the trees—trees that Cooper swears produce some of the best flavored chocolate in the world. He’s the founder of the Original Hawaiian Chocolate Factory.

"What creates flavor are soil and environmental conditions," says Bob. "And we always say that when the creator made Hawaii he had a special day he made paradise, the special uniqueness of the volcanic soil, general rains, the sunshine."

Cacao only grows 15 to 20 degrees north or south of the equator, and that’s why Hawaii is the only place it can grow in the U.S. The trees nurture the pods for five months before changing color signaling that they are ripe and ready for picking. The pods are sliced open and the beans, which are called cacao on the tree and cocoa when they’re off, hardly look like anything you would want to eat.

The raw cocoa beans are covered with a slimy, white substance called mucilage that doesn’t taste anything like chocolate, let alone look like it. But try telling that to little Hawaiian lizards called geckos. They love the stuff. We, humans won’t go near the beans until they undergo an elaborate process, which includes fermenting the beans in wooden boxes for a week.

Then it’s onto a table to be dried in the sun for a month. And that’s just part of the process, Bob and his wife, Pam, had to learn when they moved from North Carolina to this breath-taking ocean--view property near Kona. Bob was a country club manager with no farming experience.

"We actually took a leap of faith to come to Hawaii in 1997, about 8 years ago, bought a cocoa plantation. If they doled out the information in a classroom that cocoa grew on trees, I missed it," says Bob.

But Bob was a quick study—deciding, too, that it wasn’t enough just to grow the chocolate.

"In order to keep it Hawaiian, also has the added value of being the only American chocolate," he said. " Because this is the only place it grows in America, we had to process it to keep the integrity of the chocolate for what it is: American Hawaiian."

Cooper says if he sent his beans to the mainland for processing, they would be blended with beans from other countries. So he set up what is probably the smallest chocolate factory in the world—even improvising on some of the equipment in order to save space and money. Bob showed Pat one example.

"So we actually had to use a little ingenuity, bailing wire and duct tape. This is a prime example. We do have the duct tape, the bailing wire on this."

It’s called a winnower, which is used to separate the cocoa meat or nib from the shell. The all-Hawaiian nibs are ground into a chocolate liquor paste. Cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla and powdered milk may be added depending on whether you want milk or dark chocolate. A substance called lecithin is added to create the silky, smooth chocolate which is then tempered and molded into bars, hand-wrapped by Pam. The chocolate’s used by some of the best chefs on the island.

"It’s local. It’s pure. It’s beautiful," says personal chef Carolyn Deal. "It absolutely melts in your mouth."

While chefs embrace the Hawaiian chocolate, so do a number of island farmers, who at Cooper’s encouragement are for the first time growing beans and contracting with him to process them. If the Coopers have their way, pure Hawaiian chocolate will be the next big island gourmet product.

"Chocolate becomes a way of life, says Bob with a smile. "Modern technology — it becomes obsolete. Chocolate never becomes obsolete."

Additional information:
Here in the U.S., each of us consumes, on average, more than eleven pounds of chocolate each year but the biggest chocolate consumers by far are the Swiss who savor more than 22 pounds per person, per year!

Contact information:
78-6772 Makenawai Street Kailua-Kona, Hawaii 96740
Toll Free: 1-888-447-2626
Website: www.originalhawaiianchocolatefactory.com