History

Maui Pineapple Company
Maui Pineapple Company brings a century of agricultural operations, including farming, harvesting and canning, retail management, and research and development to Hawai‘i and her people.

With his extensive land holdings firmly rooted on Maui, Henry Perrine Baldwin formed Keahua Ranch Company in 1909, which changed to Haleakala Pineapple Company in 1929 and eventually became Maui Pineapple Company, Ltd. in 1932. In West Maui, H.P. Baldwin’s Honolua Ranch became Baldwin Packers when it turned to pineapple as its primary crop.

Eventually, the company grew to cultivate several thousand acres in pineapple, which were harvested for canning and juice. Maui Pineapple Company purchased the Kahului cannery facility in 1934 and began hauling all their fruit from the fields in Hali‘imaile, East Maui by five-ton trucks. Over the next decade, the Hali‘imaile Plantation village grew to include a dispensary, gym, kitchen, theater, meeting hall and store.

In Central Maui, the cannery was a hive of activity for processing canned pineapple and pineapple juice. The company employed hundreds of workers, many of whom stayed for a lifetime. In 1962, West Maui’s Baldwin Packers and the Maui Pineapple Company operations merged under one umbrella. The Lahaina cannery was closed and all pineapple processing moved to Kahului Cannery. In the late 1960s, the company entered into a joint venture known as the Maui Container Company to manufacture cans. For four decades, Maui Pineapple Company processed millions of tons of pineapple and manufactured billions of cans. In 2007, the can plant and cannery processing facility closed.

When Maui Gold® extra sweet pineapple was introduced in 2005, Maui Pineapple Company’s focus turned to fresh pineapple for wholesale and retail markets. The company began building a $24 million, cutting edge multi-purpose processing facility in Kahului next to its cannery, which opened in June 2006. While this facility concentrates on fresh fruit packing, it also provides agricultural services, such as refrigerated storage, freight consolidation and warehousing to the greater Maui farming and food processing community.

Maui Gold®
In the early 1920s, the Pineapple Research Institute of Hawai‘i embarked on a lengthy hybridization program to replace the Cayenne or Champaka pineapple, a canning variety, with a hardier and higher-yielding fruit. The result was an extra sweet golden strain of pineapple developed in the 1980s after 60 years of meticulous plant breeding, keen field observations and evaluations of hundreds of thousands of pineapple varieties.

Dr. David Williams, former research director of Maui Pineapple Company, and Calvin Oda, current senior vice president of product development, discovered the Maui Gold® variety growing among its thousands of plants. After many years of additional research and development, Maui Pineapple Company introduced the Maui Gold® variety to the market in 2005.

Today, Maui Gold® is grown in the rich volcanic soils caressed by cooling tradewinds at the Honolua Plantation on the slopes of Mauna Kahalawai, the West Maui mountains above Kapalua Resort. The pineapples are specially cultivated, individually hand-selected and picked only when fully ripe and ready to eat. Maui’s temperate climate and nourishing soil encourages the growth and harvesting of pineapple year-round, so it’s always available.

Available only from Maui Pineapple Company, Maui Gold® is a naturally sweeter fruit with a lower acid content, a rich golden color and a sweet pineapple aroma.

Maui Gold® … Great Place … Great Pineapple. Click here to purchase sweet Maui Gold® online.