Coffee Meets Chocolate at Mānoa Chocolate’s Café
Mānoa Chocolate’s new venture puts chocolatey coffee drinks front and center.
Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino
Dylan Butterbaugh likes trees. He graduated from UH wondering how he could make a living growing them, which led to his creation of Mānoa Chocolate. It was a huge ambition, since cacao trees take money, land and years to grow. So in 2010, Butterbaugh bought local dried cacao seeds and started making craft chocolate in his parents’ kitchen. Then came a proper factory and store in Kailua, 5 leased acres in Waialua where he planted his own trees, a bigger factory along with farm and factory tours and, in Waikīkī, a chocolate store. This year, Butterbaugh introduced a different twist at his Kailua shop: Mānoa Café, a coffee bar with chocolate drinks.
Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino
Why would one of Hawai‘i’s top craft chocolatiers branch into coffee? For Butterbaugh, it wasn’t a stretch. Chocolate drinks and coffee are both ancient. Flavor-wise, they go well together. And there are the trees. Mānoa Chocolate recently planted a couple of hundred coffee trees in Waialua. Beans from those trees will appear in Mānoa Chocolate’s bars this year; in a few more years, they’ll join the café’s single-origin Kona and Maui beans and blends from El Salvador, Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico. Chocolate from other Hawai‘i growers is already in the company’s hot chocolate, salted caramel latte, dirty chocolate chai and chocolate cortado drinks.
Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino
“Business models need to evolve and you gotta see not only what you like to do, but also what customers are asking for. As a company focused on value-added products that can grow here, coffee is a natural progression,” Butterbaugh says. “And it’s just fun to add value to it in a way that people enjoy. But my end goal is to have a large chocolate factory sitting on a large cacao orchard where people can come and learn about how we grow and make it. The end goal for Hawai‘i is to develop a cacao industry that is strong and capable of seeing thousands of acres of cacao orchards.” Which is, incidentally, why Butterbaugh chose the word mānoa—it means vast, deep and solid.
333 Uluniu St., Kailua, manoachocolate.com, @manoachocolate
SEE ALSO: Mānoa Chocolate Opens a Coffee Roaster and Café
Mari Taketa is the dining editor of HONOLULU Magazine and editor of Frolic Hawai‘i.
