Maui Cacao – The Harvesting Process

Our first cacao harvest was made in Spring 2018, what a fantastic moment for everyone connected with Maui Ku‘ia Estate Chocolate! Cacao farming is an interesting, labor intensive and very colorful process and in this week’s blog we’d like to show you how we have been manually harvesting our crops up at our beautiful West Maui farm. Cacao pods are the fruit from a tree, whose name is Theobroma cacao—this translates as “food of the gods.” Each tree will yield about 20-100 pods per year, and it takes 12-15 average pods to make a pound of chocolate. We expect our first year’s total haul to weigh in at approximately 2204 lb. We currently have 20 acres of cacao trees and all our harvesting to date has been done by hand. We simply make a clean cut through the peduncle (stem)
Our first cacao harvest was made in Spring 2018, what a fantastic moment for everyone connected with Maui Ku‘ia Estate Chocolate! Cacao farming is an interesting, labor intensive and very colorful process and in this week’s blog we’d like to show you how we have been manually harvesting our crops up at our beautiful West Maui farm. Cacao pods are the fruit from a tree, whose name is Theobroma cacao—this translates as “food of the gods.” Each tree will yield about 20-100 pods per year, and it takes