Old Friends: Ed & Don’s a ‘forgotten brand,’ but ready to step back into spotlight

Ed & Don’s of Hawaii is alive and well, and getting a face-lift after 61 years, but still making candy the old-fashioned way — by hand. On Saturday, the company relaunched its chocolate macadamia nut line, introducing three white chocolates, and freshening up its look with a red hibiscus logo.

Started in 1956 out of a small kitchen in Kaimuki, Ed & Don’s has been lying low for so long it’s become “a forgotten brand,” says General Manager Jun Munakata Krook. But when people hear the candy is still available, their faces light up in surprise, Krook said, and a fond memory often follows.

Gale Sasagawa, director of operations at the California headquarters since 1985, added that whenever people learn she works for the company, they exclaim: “Oh my God! I grew up with Ed & Don’s!”

Many called it “the See’s Candies of Hawaii,” music to the ears of the owners, who wanted to make the finest chocolates in paradise, Sasagawa said.

The rejuvenation of the brand doesn’t mean the company is discarding the traditional methods developed by the late founder, Martha Maier. Most of the chocolates and macadamia-nut brittles are made with little automation, and they’re all hand-packed.

CLAIM TO FAME

Krook said handcrafted chocolates were once a big part of Ed & Don’s local sales, but the buttery, crunchy brittle, accented with coconut, mac nuts and other tropical flavors, has always been “Martha’s trademark.” She prided herself on using fresh ingredients and no additives — ahead of her time.

“We make sure we don’t deviate from the old-style recipes and process,” Krook said, and they still use use vintage machines. Longtime employees are relied upon to gauge a candy’s temperature and texture by look, feel and experience. “If they mistime it, it can burn and the entire batch is ruined. … it’s literally split seconds.”

Lydia Saoit, a floor supervisor who recently retired after 38 years, especially enjoyed the sensory process of dipping nuts in chocolate with her nimble fingers, and working with her colleagues — “We were like a family ohana.”

Some machines were introduced in the early 1980s, but much of the work continued to be done by hand. Or, as Saoit said, “We made chocolate by heart.”

Another longtime employee was kitchen chef Jimmy Gould, who Sasagawa said, “breathed Ed & Don’s” and knew by heart all the recipes for the chocolate turtles, chews, various creams and nougats. By the late 1990s, after Gould died, “that’s when the art of all the specialty chocolates faded away,” she said.

They had all the original recipes, but Gould didn’t “pass on all his secrets to make it just right … that are not written down in the recipe books. We all loved Jimmy. We lost a part of Ed & Don’s through him.”

THE FAMILY

Martha Maier, a former Realtor, ate candy every day and couldn’t live without it, she said in a 1977 Honolulu Advertiser interview. She started making her own, as “there wasn’t any good candy around then.”

She and her husband, William Maier, founded Ed & Don’s in 1956, but he died shortly after. They named the company after their sons, and son Edwin became business manager and eventually president of the Ala Moana Center’s new outlet in 1959.

Martha Maier sold the company in 1985 to longtime friend Vladimir Grave, founder and CEO of the Oritz Corp., a food exporter to Japan.

Before Edwin Maier died of cancer in 1984, he had asked Grave to promise to “take care of Ed & Don’s for me, and take care of my people,” Sasagawa said.

She added that Martha Maier was “so passionate and proud of her products” that she still kept visiting the factory even after the sale, until she died in 1990.

THE BUSINESS

The company’s Ala Moana store was once the “largest and finest of the chain,” which also included outlets at the International Market Place and Moanalua Shopping Center, plus two on Maui.

In 1979, Edwin Maier, inspired by a visit to a mainland dairy, concocted 25 ice cream flavors and seven sherbets, ranging from poha berry to Tangy Pineapple, according to a Honolulu Star-Bulletin article. The confections were made locally and initially sold from the popular Ed & Don’s Ice Cream Parlor at Ala Moana, later becoming available at restaurants and grocery stores.

Sasagawa remembers that the parlor also served sandwiches, and a separate candy store was elsewhere in Ala Moana Center. Both closed around 1993 because of rising rents, and the company shifted to making chocolates wholesale.

But Ed & Don’s couldn’t compete with other companies making the same chocolates — though theirs were hand-dipped and used only whole nuts — for the $2.99 that tourists wanted to pay per box. For many years the chocolates were mainly exported to Asian customers, who were always loyal followers, she said.

The ice creams were discontinued, replaced by retailers like Haagen-Dazs and Baskin-Robbins.

The company moved to a small factory in the Ala Moana area, then in 1990 to a larger site in Moanalua, which has just a retail counter. The company once employed almost 50 workers, but is now down to 30 loyal employees, Sasagawa said.

WHAT’S NEW

The company’s three new white chocolate-covered macadamia nut candies are flavored with matcha (green tea), alaea (Hawaiian sea salt) and pineapple. Nine other products have been repackaged, including the chocolates and brittles, exclusively sold at five ABC Stores, mostly in Waikiki.

An aloha-shirt line comprises special boxes with two pieces of candy in each, the boxes designed to fold out into an aloha shirt. They’re sold in packages of six or 12 boxes ($13.99 and $26.99).

“It brings a little bit of aloha back home with an aloha shirt for a keepsake,” Sasagawa added.

Its old palm-tree logo now replaced with an eye-catching red hibiscus, Ed & Don’s is aiming for a “retro feel as well to acknowledge we were here back in the 1950s and we’re still here,” Sasagawa said.

“Old Friends” catches up with longtime local food producers. Email suggestions to crave@staradvertiser.com or call Pat Gee at 529-4749.