About Pete

I’m Pete—third-generation in Hawaiʻi agriculture, farmer, cacao obsessive, professional problem solver, and someone who apparently decided regular farming wasn’t complicated enough.

My family planted our cacao in Mililani in 2015. What started as another crop on the farm turned into something I became completely consumed by. The deeper I got into cacao, the more I realized there was to learn—and that was pretty much the end of having normal hobbies.

I’m not a chocolatier. I’m a farmer.

My obsession is everything that happens before chocolate—the soil, trees, flowers, genetics, pods, harvest, fermentation, drying, and the hundred little decisions that determine whether a bean ends up ordinary or exceptional.

And yes, I actually love cacao that much. On a normal day in the orchard, I’ll crush two or three entire pods myself. Some people have a coffee problem. I have access to ten acres of cacao, which is arguably worse.

In 2023, cacao from our Mililani farm earned Gold at the Cacao of Excellence competition, putting our beans among some of the best cacao in the world. That was a pretty incredible moment—but mostly it confirmed something I’d already started to believe:

Hawaiʻi can grow world-class cacao.

For me, Mililani Estate Cacao is about seeing just how far we can take that.

I’m constantly experimenting. Different fermentation methods, temperatures, timing, drying techniques, orchard practices—measuring things, changing things, occasionally breaking things, rebuilding them better, and chasing improvements most normal people probably wouldn’t notice.

But that’s farming.

Agriculture has been part of my family in Hawaiʻi for three generations, and I take a lot of pride in carrying that forward in my own slightly unconventional way. My dad was the pioneer that decided to start the first orchard style cacao farm in Hawaii and I get to take that to the next level. Making something my daughter will be proud of one day—that means more to me than the awards.

What I want Mililani Estate Cacao to become is bigger than just producing great beans. I want people to come here and actually experience cacao—walk through the orchard, crack open a pod, taste cacao fresh from the farm, see a fermentation working, and understand the ridiculous amount of effort hiding inside something most of us have known our entire lives simply as “chocolate.”

So if you visit the farm and see me walking around with my pruners, eating my second cacao pod before lunch, staring suspiciously into a fermentation box, or covered in grease because I got distracted fixing a tractor...

Everything is operating normally.

Welcome to Mililani Estate Cacao.

Pete Hix

Managing Partner