Episodes 

Dylan and Greg discuss how the Dominican Republic has succeeded in becoming a successful producer of cacao, highlighting their Hispaniola vs Sanchez model of grading beans. 

In this episode we touch on a few essential approaches when prepping a room for a new machine.

There are two main factors to consider when deciding on a location for your factory; urban or rural? Whether you’re in a busy city or in the middle of farm land each location comes with pros and co...

Today we have for you the most in-depth Business of Chocolate episode to date. We filmed this episode back in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. It was a precarious time and we were analyzing the n...

The beginnings of Manoa Chocolate were rough. 14 hour days, running out of money, endless equipment issues, crazy inefficiencies, and more. We learned as we went, and year after year we managed to ...

A friend and fellow chocolate maker asked some questions about scaling a chocolate factory. The questions were so good that we decided to use the answers as an opportunity to make this episode. Whe...

In this episode we welcome back our good friend Greg D'Alesandre of Dandelion Chocolate. Once again we have a wide ranging conversation, but this time we focus in on various business models of choc...

10 years and 4 factory expansions later, Dylan covers the ins and outs of what it took to scale Manoa Chocolate. Scaling a business comes in many forms. Some of the most significant that we cover i...

In this season 4 finale we dive deep into what it has taken to build the Manoa Chocolate brand. Dylan discusses the mistakes and the successes that the brand has made as it continues to progress fo...

This episode Dylan does an overview of the cost of cacao. We look at different types of cacao ranging from the commodity price of $2.26 a kilo, to $10 a kilo and Hawaiian cacao at over $20 a kilo. ...

In this episode we discuss co-packing; also referred to as private label and white label (Mānoa Chocolate does this as well for brands and farms who want their own label). Chances are, most the cho...

Dylan breaks down how Manoa Chocolate is changing its business in these unusual times. With roughly a 90% loss in income, he discusses what the company has begun to reduce, implement and focus on t...