• Real working chocolate farm
• Hawaiian heritage and authenticity
• Interactive farm tasting experience, education, and comparisons

Chocolate Farm Tour

Hawaiʻi is the only state where the chocolate tree grows, and the best place to experience a live chocolate tree orchard is the Lydgate family’s 46-acre farm. You’re invited to enjoy Chocolate From Branch to Bar, an educational guided tour of everything there is to know about chocolate, including growing cacao trees, the taste of fresh chocolate fruit, harvesting, fermentation, and sun drying of cacao beans, all the way to an extensive tasting highlighting the fascinating diversity of flavors found in Hawaiian cacao.

Botanical Tour and Tropical Fruit Tasting

The first part of their three-hour guided tour is especially fun for fruit and flower lovers, as you stroll through their gardens, stopping frequently to taste the tropical fruits that are in season. Depending on the month, these may include Tahitian lime, Hawaiian sugar cane, lilikoi, rambutan, longan, lychee, soursop, sapodilla, eggfruit, ka’u orange, apple banana, mountain apple, mamey sapote, chocolate sapote, and more. You’ll also taste their Farm’s award-winning honey, and see vanilla beans growing on the vine, plus dozens of exotic tropical plants such as their rare red sealing-wax palms and black bamboo. All along, your guides share their farm’s part in creating sustainable diversified agriculture on Kauai.

After the main fruit tasting you will  reach the chocolate orchard, and here they cut open a ripe chocolate pod so you can taste fresh cacao fruit. They  then move into their chocolate tasting tent, where you sit comfortably in the shade while they explain the post-harvest processing of cacao. As you may know, dark chocolate is actually health food, and your guides explain its antioxidant and other health benefits, as well as outline how you can make chocolate from scratch in your home kitchen.

Chocolate Tasting

Best of all, you’ll enjoy an extensive dark chocolate tasting with all of the chocolate grown on their farm, compared with examples from all over the world that highlight the distinctive flavors found in craft chocolate. Similar to a wine tasting, they will teach you how to taste chocolate like a connoisseur. You’ll also learn chocolate’s history, from its discovery by the first Mesoamericans, to its revered status as a divine plant in the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec cultures, to its introduction to Europe in the 1500s, to the rise of industrial milk chocolate, to the modern bean-to-bar chocolate movement and Hawaii’s place in the new American chocolate scene.

Family-Friendly Options

Although children age 7 and over are welcome on tour, those families with younger children are welcome to stop by the gift shop between 9:30 am and 2:30 pm Monday through Friday. There they have a friendly guide who will offer you chocolate samples and give you fascinating information. And you’ll have the opportunity to purchase their farm products. They find this to be the best option for families with small children and hope that you will join them there!