By Dave Segal
Hawaii’s once-rich agricultural industry, renowned throughout the 1900s for its pineapple and sugar crops, has suffered another devastating blow.
With the last remaining sugar company hanging on by a thread, Maui Land & Pineapple Co. said yesterday it would stop planting pineapple immediately, cease all pineapple operations by the end of the year, and lay off more than 45 percent of its work force amid a companywide restructuring that repositions subsidiary Kapalua Land Co.
By SCOTT STODDARD,
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
James Dole was 22 when he set out for Hawaii in 1899.
He had little experience in business or farming.
In his arsenal were an agriculture degree from Harvard, a modest sum of cash and hopes of prospering from the territory’s efforts to diversify its sugar-dependent economy.
But his arrival at Honolulu in November that year wasn’t auspicious.
Attempts by farmers to grow coffee beans, rubber, vegetables and fruit had failed, and the town was placed in quarantine for six months due to bubonic plague. Dole waited out the plague at the home of his cousin Sanford Dole, who was soon to become Hawaii’s first governor.
By August 1900, James was ready to act. He bought a 64-acre farm in Wahiawa, near Honolulu.
And he tried growing crops before settling on the fruit that would make him famous: pineapple.
“After some experimentation, I concluded that the land was better adapted to pineapples than to peas, pigs or potatoes,” he said in the Harvard class of 1899’s 25th reunion report in 1924.
His Hawaiian Pineapple Co. was incorporated in December 1901.
Dole’s bold aim: Sell pineapples to every store in America.
At the time, few Americans were familiar with pineapples. The fruit was delicate and difficult to ship from the tropical areas where they grew. Efforts to distribute pineapples in cans had also failed.
“Back at the turn of the century it wasn’t a product that many people had tasted,” Dole spokesman Marty Ordman told IBD. “Jim Dole was really the one that brought it to the masses.”
But success didn’t come easy.
Maui Pineapple Company, Ltd. (MPC) is a subsidiary of Maui Land & Pineapple Company Ltd. , and is the USA?s largest grower, processor, and shipper of Hawaiian pineapples. MPC is the only producer of Maui-grown pineapples. The company was established in 1909, and is based in Kahului, Maui, Hawaii. It currently cultivates and processes approximately 6,000 acres of two varieties of pineapple: extra-sweet Maui Gold? and Maui Gold Organic pineapple.
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