Chocolate, reduced to its botanical roots, comes from two embryonic leaves, tucked inside a bean, tucked inside a pod, hanging from a tree.
Left to their own devices, these leaves, more correctly called cotyledons or nibs, would become a new cacao plant. Subjected instead to the stresses of fermenting, drying, roasting, winnowing, refining and tempering, they become chocolate.
The quality of that chocolate is determined every step of the way, beginning with the quality of the bean, all through its handling and in the ingredients added.
You can get a 13-ounce bag of Hershey’s Kisses for a few bucks. Or you can get a single 2.3-ounce bar of Lonohana Estate Chocolate for $14.
Lonohana founder Seneca Klassen is used to the sticker shock. “A lot of people will say, ‘$14!’ but I try to tell them, ‘It’s not a candy bar. It’s going to last you a week.’”
In other words, this chocolate — which originates on Lonohana’s cacao farm in Waialua and is processed at its factory in Kalihi — is powerful, designed to satisfy in just a few bites.
One of its bars, the Kanahiku 70 percent dark, was the only Hawaii product to win a 2016 Good Food Award, recognizing taste, authenticity and sustainability in production.
The only way to ensure a steady supply of this chocolate is to join Lonohana’s chocolate club. Members receive deliveries six times a year of a varying trio of bars. They can opt for one bar of each flavor ($250 annually) two of each ($450) or three of each ($650). Need a Valentine’s Day gift? How much does your special someone love chocolate?
The chocolate club, started in 2014, has 230 members from as far away as Japan and Israel, Klassen said, and has room for a few more. The mix members receive always includes a simple dark chocolate, he said. “The other two are just playful.” The last batch included one with Kona coffee and one with sea salt.
The priority is added ingredients that are locally sourced.
Once he made a chocolate infused with the extract of petals from organic tuberose flowers. “That was kind of polarizing. People either super dug it, or some people said, ‘Don’t do that again.’ ”
Single bars are sold only after membership orders are filled. But that will change by summer when Lonohana opens a shop at the new SALT complex in Kakaako. The shop will sell chocolate and book tours of the factory.
Klassen, who started Lonohana with the planting of cacao trees in 2009, compares his craft to the making of fine wine. His aim, he said, it is to elevate chocolate to “an object of connoisseurship … where we can do what wine country does with wine, but with chocolate, producing a value-added product in its place of origin.”
For information on the Lonohana Chocolate Club or to arrange a factory tour, call 223-9997 or visit lonohana.com.
