Welcome back to the Maui Ku‘ia Estate Chocolate blog. This week we’d like to give
you a peek behind the scenes at our construction site. It may not look like much
right now, but this will soon become our state-of-the-art Lahaina chocolate factory,
Chef’s Table dining, Ku‘ia Pavilion and retail store.

As you can see from the photographs below, we are fortunate to be located in a great spot—close to the beautiful West Maui Mountains. When complete, our facility will offer views that take in the Pacific Ocean, neighbor islands and our very own cacao farm.

We officially broke ground last month. Early work involved the use of an excavator,
hoe ram and plenty of rock moving as we dug the factory’s drainage system. The
system’s dry wells will contain and percolate rainwater and air conditioning system
condensate, so that it doesn’t run into the local sewer system.

As you may already know from reading the Factory section of our website, the Maui
Ku‘ia Estate Chocolate Factory is going to be 100 percent solar powered and the
steel that you see in the image below will be used in the structure that supports our
photovoltaic panels. We are incredibly proud to say that we make delicious
chocolate but the fact that it will all be crafted in a sustainable, off-grid facility
makes it all the sweeter!

In the next picture, you can see the team hard at work, adding in the concrete to the rebar to create a footing for our CMU firewall. As we are less than 10 feet away (on our south side) from the nearest building—a coffee-roasting facility—this wall
needs to be added as a firebreak.

Things are starting to take shape and we couldn’t be more excited! We’ll be back
with more construction updates as work progresses. You can also keep in touch
with all the latest news by following us on Instagram.

Mahalo for visiting!