Maui Ku’ia Estate is Making Tree to Bar Chocolate in Hawaii

Cacao growing in dry conditions photo credit Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate

As one of the few chocolate makers in the entire world to grow the cacao they turn from bean to bar, Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate is a rare breed. Just as extraordinary is the Hawaiian farm on which Ku’ia’s chocolate is grown. Cacao is a moisture-loving tree that thrives in tropical forests. That’s why most of the world’s chocolate is grown south of—or near to—the equator. West Africa alone produces 50% of the world’s beans. But Ku’ia’s estate on the island of Maui is in Lahaina, a place so dry it’s virtually a desert. “Lahaina in Hawaiian means ‘merciless sun,’” says Ku’ia’s founder and CEO, Gunars Valkirs. No matter how much water the trees get through irrigation, it will never be “enough to recreate a rainforest.”

Growing cacao on Maui

Chocolate for sale at Maui Ku'ia Estate factory store photo credit Shoshi Parks

In this type of thirsty ecosystem, cacao shouldn’t be able to grow at all. Instead, it thrives. When carefully tended, the hot, arid environment puts just enough stress on the trees to produce a complex and fruity flavor no other chocolate has. Even the seasoned judges at the first chocolate competition Ku’ia entered “all said they’d never tasted this amazing flavor in chocolate,” says Valkirs.

That flavor, however, comes at a price. “Hawaii estate cacao is the most expensive in the world,” says Valkirs, due in large part to the cost of labor—a cost that’s only increased in the aftermath of the wildfires that devastated Lahaina in 2023. While the Ku’ia farm was spared by the flames (extremely high winds produced by the fires stripped the cacao trees of their leaves, but they have since recovered), many residents were displaced from their homes.

That year, a family could expect to pay a median price of $5,000 to $6,000 a month for a four or five bedroom house. A little over a year later, rent has increased an additional 10- 20%. Valkirs has had to spend more just to ensure that his workers, including three on the farm, eight in the factory, and nine on the retail side of the business, are able to make a living wage.

Tasting on the Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate tour photo credit Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate

Today, the craft chocolate company produces three types of tree to bar chocolate from estate-grown beans: Dark chocolate, dark milk chocolate, and dark chocolate mocha made with Maui-grown coffee. They source the rest from two carefully-vetted operations, “one of the finest farms in the world,” according to Valkirs, located in Costa Esmeralda, Ecuador, and one from Uganda’s Semuliki Forest, whose beans won the already award-winning company more dark chocolate accolades.

The South American and African beans are used in around two dozen artisan-made varieties at Ku’ia, including those flavored with the dried powder of tropical fruits like mango and guava grown on their Lahaina estate. These flavors of chocolate, along with their three estate-grown varieties, are all roasted, winnowed, milled, tempered and molded at the company’s small, solar-powered factory in Lahaina. Built in 2019, it just narrowly avoided the fire damage that consumed some of its neighbors in 2023. 

Chocolate Making

Gunar Valkirs leading the Sunday Factory Experience Tour photo credit Shoshi Parks

Ku’ia makes a batch of each variety every six weeks, taking great pains to prevent different beans and flavors from contaminating each individual style. They can produce 36,000 pieces of bite-sized chocolate in a single workday, which is then distributed among Ku’ia’s public retail shop and cafe, its rooftop tasting room, and chocolate lovers near and far via their online marketplace and Chocolate of the Month Club.

A mission for good

Cacao growing on Maui photo credit Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate

Valkirs has been thrilled with the success of Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate, which began as a retirement hobby farm in 2013. But the founder, who was a biotech entrepreneur in his former life, has no interest in lining his own pockets with the profits. The company is driven by a mission to do more, embracing a model of philanthropy and objectives like transparent sourcing and energy sustainability..

Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate donates 100% of the net proceeds from the company’s island-made confections, and all of those from their Sunday Factory Experience Tour, to a rotating cast of local charitable organizations, including the Maui Food Bank, Hawai’i Land Trust, and ‘Ai Pono Foundation. Sales of tickets for the company’s Sunset Jazz shows, held at the tasting room every Sunday, go to benefit the music education programs at Jazz Maui.

Growing chocolate in an ecosystem never meant to produce it—and weathering the natural disasters endemic to that ecosystem—has been a challenge at times. But there’s no question that Valkirs’ gamble, building an artisan operation that both makes a uniquely delicious product and invests that product’s profits back into the community, has paid off. Since Maui Ku’ia Estate Chocolate opened, Maui is just a little bit sweeter than it was before.