Macadamia nut milk helped boost first-quarter revenue for a growing local consumer products company that is also Hawaii’s largest mac nut farmer, though net income stayed in the red because introducing new products also elevated expenses.

Hilo-based Royal Hawaiian Orchards LP reported a 66 percent jump in revenue to $5.8 million in the January-March period from $3.5 million in the same quarter last year.

The company also said in the financial report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday that it slimmed a net loss to $629,000 in the recent quarter from a $658,000 loss a year earlier.

Scott Wallace, Royal Hawaiian president and CEO, said the revenue gain was driven by packaged food products made from the company’s mac nuts, including milk and butter introduced this year.

Wallace said the consumer response so far has been good.

“People really like it,” he said. “The response has been positive.”

The butter comes in two flavors: regular and dark chocolate. Wallace said the chocolate version is similar to the hazelnut spread Nutella but made with macadamia nuts.

There are four varieties of the milk: regular and vanilla, either unsweetened or sweetened with cane sugar. Wallace said the beverage is part of a category of milk alternatives that is growing in popularity. Competing products include soy milk, rice milk, almond milk and cashew milk.

“Retailers have been anxious to put it in,” he said. “Whenever there’s a growing category, they want to stoke the fire. The milk alternative category has been growing quite rapidly.”

Wallace said Royal Hawaiian is pricing pints of its mac nut milk at $3.49 in mainland stores, which is a premium to $2.99 pints of almond milk. The mac nut milk should appear in Longs Drugs stores in Hawaii in about a month at a little higher price because of costs to ship the milk from a mainland production plant.

The new products are the latest introductions since Royal Hawaiian started making a line of snack food in 2012 as a way to earn a bigger return on its crop, which is historically sold raw in bulk primarily to snack maker Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp.

Other Royal Hawaiian snacks include seasoned nuts, nuts mixed with dried fruit, and dark chocolate-covered nuts infused with acai, goji and pomegranate flavors.

The company has estimated that its packaged food was being sold in about 15,000 U.S. retail stores at the end of last year.

Royal Hawaiian, which farms about 5,400 acres of macadamia trees on Hawaii island, still sells some nuts in bulk. The company said unprocessed nut sales to other customers totaled $1.9 million in the first quarter, down from $2.9 million a year earlier.

Part of the decrease in raw nut sales was due to a decline in farm production. The company produced 4.6 million pounds of nuts in the first quarter, down from 5.4 million pounds a year earlier. The drop was largely because the year-ago quarter had a bigger crop.

Revenue for Royal Hawaiian’s “branded products” operations, which include the sale of some processed nuts to other customers, surged to $4.4 million in the first quarter from $878,000 a year earlier. Of this increase, $1.6 million came from packaged food, and $2 million came from processed nut sales.

Royal Hawaiian said it spent more money developing and marketing its new products, which contributed to its net loss as the company works to keep growing its packaged-food line.

The company also said it is investing to enhance internal controls to ensure accurate financial reporting after a recent management review found a need for improvement. As part of the plan, Royal Hawaiian said it has hired two new accounting employees and intends to hire a controller to replace its previous controller.

Partnership shares in Royal Hawaiian, which typically trade lightly on an over-the-counter stock exchange and are mainly held by Denver investor and former Quark Software Inc. CEO Farhad “Fred” Ebrahimi, traded last on Monday and closed at $2.85. Over the last 52 weeks, shares have closed between a low of $2.71 on March 18 and a $3.24 high on Jan. 8.