Chocolate Farm Tour

• Recognized the best in the world at the Cocoa of Excellence Awards in Paris (3 times!)
• Taste chocolate with naturally present fruity, floral, spice, and chocolatey flavors
• Real working chocolate farm
• Hawaiian heritage and authenticity
• Interactive farm tasting experience
• Extensive chocolate tasting, education, and comparisons
• Taste ripe chocolate fruit year round
• We make 100% of our chocolate with Hawaiian single-origin cocoa beans
• Gift shop with beautiful farm products great for gifts
• Cacao nectar products found nowhere else in the world!
• Friendly knowledgable staff
• Highly rated on TripAdvisor
• #1 Best Guided Tour Hawaii Magazine Readers Choice Awards
• Featured in Zooey Deschanel’s series What Am I Eating on HBO Max

• Advance reservations are required.
• Lydgate Farms is located on Kauai’s East Side, in the foothills above the town of Kapaa.
• After you book online, we will email you written driving directions to the Farm.
• Chocolate trees love moisture, so we operate rain or shine – in fact, our signature Chocolate Tasting & Farm Tour is one of Kauai’s best rainy-day activities.
• The tour sells out regularly so book in advance of your visit to guarantee your spot
• Deluxe Adult Tickets are available at checkout for the ultimate connoisseur. Each comes with a customizable top-shelf chocolate collection delivered to you after your tour. One per couple is recommended for the ultimate chocolate experience. One of these packages will be included with each of these tickets purchased — up to a limit of 4 per party. This ticket type is unique in that it includes both the tour and chocolate to take home priced with a club discount.

Hawaii is the only state where the chocolate tree grows, and the best place to experience a live chocolate tree orchard is the Lydgate family’s 46-acre farm. You’re invited to enjoy Chocolate From Branch to Bar, an educational guided tour of everything there is to know about chocolate, including growing cacao trees, the taste of fresh chocolate fruit, harvesting, fermentation, and sun drying of cacao beans, all the way to an extensive tasting highlighting the fascinating diversity of flavors found in Hawaiian cacao. In addition to all the tropical fruit and chocolate we taste, the tour is a visual feast as well, so be sure to bring your camera.

The first part of our three-hour guided tour is especially fun for fruit and flower lovers, as we stroll through our gardens, stopping frequently to taste the tropical fruits that are in season. Depending on the month, these may include Tahitian lime, Hawaiian sugar cane, lilikoi, rambutan, longan, lychee, soursop, sapodilla, eggfruit, ka’u orange, apple banana, mountain apple, mamey sapote, chocolate sapote, and more. You’ll also taste our Farm’s award-winning honey, and see vanilla beans growing on the vine, plus dozens of exotic tropical plants such as our rare red sealing-wax palms and black bamboo. All along, your guides share our farm’s part in creating sustainable diversified agriculture on Kauai.

After the main fruit tasting we reach the chocolate orchard, and here we cut open a ripe chocolate pod so you can taste fresh cacao fruit. We then move into our chocolate tasting tent, where you sit comfortably in the shade while we explain the post-harvest processing of cacao. As you may know, dark chocolate is actually health food, and your guides explain its antioxidant and other health benefits, as well as outline how you can make chocolate from scratch in your home kitchen.

Best of all, you’ll enjoy an extensive dark chocolate tasting with all of the chocolate grown on our farm, compared with examples from all over the world that highlight the distinctive flavors found in craft chocolate. Similar to a wine tasting, we teach you how to taste chocolate like a connoisseur. You’ll also learn chocolate’s history, from its discovery by the first Mesoamericans, to its revered status as a divine plant in the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec cultures, to its introduction to Europe in the 1500s, to the rise of industrial milk chocolate, to the modern bean-to-bar chocolate movement and Hawaii’s place in the new American chocolate scene.

Although we no longer accept farm tour reservations for children under the age of 7, we do invite those families with younger children to visit our new Lydgate Chocolate Tasting Room in downtown Kapaa: now open Monday – Friday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. There we have friendly team members who will offer you chocolate samples and share fascinating information. And you’ll have the opportunity to purchase a selection of our farm products. We find this to be the best option for families with small children and hope that you will join us there!