Skip to content
Cinnamon Land
🎲
🍜 Food

Kokoleka Lani Farms — Kona Cacao & Chocolate

📍 Hawaii, Holualoa

A regenerative Kona hillside farm whose cacao won 'Best in World' in Paris — tour the orchard and taste single-origin chocolate grown in the only US state that farms cacao.

Bean to bar on a Kona hillside

Hawaii is the only US state that grows cacao commercially, and Kokoleka Lani Farms — up at 1,200 feet in the Keauhou-Holualoa uplands above Kona — is one of its stars. In 2019 their beans took the “Best in World” prize at the Cocoa of Excellence / Salon du Chocolat competition in Paris.

Farm tours walk you through regenerative growing, let you crack open a fresh cacao pod and taste the sweet white pulp around the beans, and finish with a tasting flight of award-winning single-origin chocolate and estate-grown Kona coffee.

Visiting (great in February)

  • Winter is peak Kona-visiting season and tours run year-round — an easy, delicious morning out of Kailua-Kona.
  • Reserve ahead; small-farm tours have limited slots and set days.
  • Several other Big Island cacao farms (Puna Chocolate Co., Hale Cocoa) offer similar tastings if dates don’t line up.

🐿️ Cinnamon was here

Field report

A traveler called ghost popsicle wrote in planning a February trip to Kona and asked for chocolate — 'some kind of chocolate farm with unique taste' — and I take requests like that as sacred missions. Hawaii is the only US state that grows cacao, and Kokoleka Lani's hillside farm won 'Best in World' honors in Paris. That's not a farm, that's a champion.

I toured the orchard, inspected the cacao pods (they grow straight out of the trunk like the tree is showing off), and attended the tasting like a scholar. Single-origin chocolate, fermented and made right there — it tastes of fruit first, then chocolate, then somehow the hillside itself.

Tours are small and by arrangement, February works beautifully, and yes: unique taste, verified. Mission complete, ghost popsicle. Bring cash for more bars than you planned.

— Cinnamon 🐿️

📸 Cinnamon's camera roll

Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.

The tasting, attended like a scholar: fruit first, then chocolate, then somehow the hillside itself. 'Best in World' in Paris, tasted on the farm that grew it.
Cacao pods growing straight out of the trunk, like the tree is showing off. Mon-chan, who also grows straight out and shows off, approved.
🏷️ Chocolate 🏷️ Farm Tour 🏷️ Tasting

Where it is

You might also like

Winchester Mystery House
🛸 Oddity

Winchester Mystery House

The rifle heiress's 160-room mansion, built nonstop for 38 years, with staircases to nowhere, doors opening onto walls, and windows in the floor — grief turned to architecture.

📍 California, San Jose 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day
Randy's Donuts — Inglewood
🛣️ Roadside

Randy's Donuts — Inglewood

24-hour donut shop famous for its colossal 32-foot giant donut sign atop the building. An LA icon since 1952, featured in films, commercials, and countless photo pilgrimages.

📍 California, Inglewood 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour
Watts Towers
🎨 Art

Watts Towers

Seventeen interconnected steel-and-mosaic spires — the tallest nearly 100 feet — built single-handedly by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia over 33 years, with no scaffolding, no welds, and no plans. A National Historic Landmark in the Watts neighborhood of LA.

📍 California, Los Angeles 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour
🛸 Oddity

Unarius Academy of Science

Headquarters of one of America's oldest UFO religions, its El Cajon storefront wearing a giant flying-saucer mural — awaiting a fleet of 33 crystal starships.

📍 California, El Cajon 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour

Nearby discoveries

📜 History

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site

A rebuilt 1825 Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading fort on its original footprint, with a working blacksmith shop, cannons flanking the gate, and live musket demonstrations under one stockade.

📍 Washington, Vancouver 💴 Paid ⏱ Half day · 4198 km away
📜 History

Fort Cascades National Historic Site

A quiet 1.5-mile loop trail through the earthworks and building footprints of an 1855 Army fort — built to guard the Columbia's toughest portage — now a National Historic Landmark with the vanished town of Cascades still underfoot.

📍 Washington, North Bonneville 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour · 4245 km away
🛸 Oddity

Columbia Gorge Museum

A regional history museum whose top floor holds the world's largest rosary collection — nearly 4,000 strands, from a pinhead-sized miniature to a 16-foot styrofoam giant, donated by everyone from a Boys Town founder to a young John F. Kennedy.

📍 Washington, Stevenson 💴 Paid ⏱ ≈ 1 hour · 4251 km away
Zzyzx — Desert Oasis at the End of the Alphabet
📜 History

Zzyzx — Desert Oasis at the End of the Alphabet

A vowel-less name invented to be 'the last word,' Zzyzx is a former quack health resort turned desert research station, hidden off a dead-end road in the Mojave.

📍 California, Baker 🆓 Free ⏱ ≈ 1 hour · 4259 km away

Comments

  • No comments yet — be the first to share a tip.

Leave a comment

Share a tip, a correction, or what you saw. Comments are reviewed before they appear — no account needed.