About John

I’m John—orchard manager, horticulture guy, fermentation magician, builder of everything, professional plant overthinker, and the person usually trying to turn one of Pete’s “I’ve got an idea” moments into something that actually works.

My background is in horticulture and wine, which, as it turns out, is a pretty good way to accidentally end up obsessed with cacao.

Because great cacao has a lot in common with great wine. It starts with the land. Variety matters. Weather matters. Harvest matters. Fermentation matters—a lot. And small decisions made along the way can completely change what you taste in the finished product.

That’s the part that hooked me.

At Mililani Estate Cacao, my world is the orchard. I’m focused on tree health, pruning, nutrition, irrigation, flowering, fruit development, harvest timing, fermentation, and all the little details that most people will never see—but eventually taste.

Petes all over the place at a million miles an hour. I'm the one trying to throw a net over him while being the backbone of the orchard.

It works surprisingly well.

We’re constantly learning from the orchard and pushing ourselves to make each harvest better than the last. Cacao will humble you pretty quickly if you think you’ve figured it out. Every fermentation is a little different, every season throws something new at you, and the trees have a remarkable ability to ignore whatever plans you made for the week.

That’s also what makes it interesting.

What I enjoy most is being part of a farm that isn’t satisfied with simply growing cacao. We want to understand it. We want to know why something worked, why something didn’t, and what we can change next time to make the cacao better.

There’s a lot happening behind every piece of great chocolate long before anyone unwraps a bar.

My job is to obsess over that part.

So if you visit Mililani Estate Cacao and see someone quietly staring at a tree, checking irrigation, taking temperatures, smelling a fermentation box, or explaining why Pete needs… to stop starting three more things before we’ve finished the first one, that’s probably me.

John

Orchard Manager & Resident Voice of Reason