Lonohana Estate Chocolate Is Committed to Ethical Farming and Manufacturing

2025 SmallBiz Editor’s Choice Award winner: Co-founders Lawrence Boone and Seneca Klassen grow cacao trees on O‘ahu’s North Shore for their chocolate bars.

The founders of Lonohana Estate Chocolate wanted to do more than just grow and sell chocolate in Hawai‘i — they wanted to do so in the best way possible.

“I wanted to create a vertically integrated farming and manufacturing company that does chocolate in a completely transparent and ethical way. It’s easy to say, but it’s incredibly hard to do,” says co-founder Seneca Klassen.

The name Lonohana serves as a constant reminder of that mission. Lono is the Hawaiian god of agriculture, fertility, rain and peace, and hana means work.

“We want to honor Lono through all of our farming practices: do right by the ‘āina and express our kuleana toward the areas we’re responsible for,” Klassen says.

In 2009, he and co-founder Lawrence Boone began planting cacao trees on 14 acres of nutrient-deprived soil on O‘ahu’s North Shore that had been abandoned after sugarcane farming.

“Chocolate is a food that tastes like the place it’s grown,” Boone says. “You have this profound interaction between all the factors – the climate, the plants, the microbiology – each one directly impacting the chocolate we make at the end of the day.”

Klassen adds that transparency is a top priority. “We want to show where our food is grown, how it’s grown and how it’s made,” he says.

Lonohana is foremost a farming business, but it also makes finished chocolate bars with flavors like salted macadamia nut, coconut crunch and passion orange guava.

“We’re striving to create local products with a global reputation – products that are as good as, or better than, anything else in their category, but are deeply local, authentic and fully integrated into their community,” says Klassen.

Another part of the mission is to educate, especially since many people have never visited a cacao farm or learned about cacao pods and seeds and how they become chocolate. So Lonohana offers tours three days a week at its factory in Kaka‘ako, in the old Kewalo Theater building.

Boone, Klassen and farm manager Duke Morgan have a holistic vision of farming.

“We’ve always farmed with a gentle touch. The only way we know how to do it is respectfully. The idea is simple: If you take care of the land, the land will take care of you. It’s a whole concept of you are farming in a way that you’re leaving the land better than how you found it,” Boone says.

Klassen adds: “We tend to think of the land as something passive, something we control, but that’s not the case. We’re collaborators with it. When you put the right things in the right place and give them a little nudge, they really take off.”