An ambitious farm and value-added food manufacturing venture on Oahu involving Kamehameha Schools has stalled for lack of investment capital.

The project, Kalona Brand Co., was announced in May 2019 and involved growing cacao, breadfruit and avocado on 222 acres of fallow North Shore farmland owned by Kamehameha Schools.

Joining the nonprofit educational trust and largest private landowner in the state were two Oregon companies — Equilibrium Capital Group, a firm managing roughly $1 billion in institutional investment capital focused on sustainable ventures including agriculture, and Greenleaf Farm Management.

Kalona’s business model was to vertically integrate food production by making chocolate from cacao, guacamole from avocados and potentially a wide variety of products from ulu, or breadfruit, such as chips, fries, hummus, yogurt and ice cream.

The plan also included devoting 20 acres to provide local consumers and schools with organic fruits and vegetables, including taro, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, cabbage, cucumbers, beets and radishes. But this aspect was abandoned early on in favor of a simpler focus on tree orchards.

The company bought farm machines, installed irrigation, prepared soil and earlier this year planted about 12,000 cacao trees on 30 acres.

Kalona also had planted about 12,000 mahogany, milo and neem tree seedlings primarily to create wind breaks that also could be harvested one day for valuable wood and neem oil.

Kawika Burgess, company CEO, said all was going according to plan until an effort failed to raise capital from other investors for a second phase.

“The business hit a lot of its goals and objectives, operationally and financially,” he said. “Everything was going well.”

In May, the company sought to hire a product development and marketing manager to initially oversee premium chocolate products from cacao expected to be ready for harvest in three years.

But a long-held objective to raise $3 million for a second phase of the farm plan could not be achieved, and that led Kalona’s partners to consider other options.

Burgess said the second phase included planting ulu, different avocado varieties and more cacao, along with planning and designing post-harvest facilities. A third phase was manufacturing.

Now, the partnership is open to someone else taking over and perhaps fulfilling the original vision or doing something different, according to Burgess.

“The options are open right now,” he said.

Kalona has seven employees and used other temporary workers for now- completed projects. Burgess said the core seven-member staff will continue to maintain the farm.

Efforts to establish Kalona as part of revitalizing agriculture and local food production in Hawaii go back more than five years.

The farm site above Haleiwa Town between the Anahulu River and Opaeula Stream was a fallow piece of roughly 1,900 contiguous acres once used to grow sugar cane as part of the former Waialua Sugar plantation run by Dole Food Co. More recently, the land owned by Kamehameha Schools was was used to grow corn.

Kamehameha Schools, a $12 billion trust, leased the land to Kalona and is a member of the partnership through affiliate Ho‘oulu Mahi‘ai LLC.