HANA – No golden ticket is needed to come to this chocolate factory – but it will take a three-hour drive on Maui’s curviest road.

Hana Gold cacao plantation is the island’s only “branch-to-bar” producer of handcrafted chocolates. Spread across 10 acres in the lush rainforest of East Maui, the plantation is opening its doors to guests of Travaasa Hana, and quickly growing with its 1,000 cacao trees.

“We’re about putting Hana on the map as a place for chocolate,” chocolate maker Aldon Frost said Thursday at the plantation. “We think the conditions here are really unique and special, especially to Maui and Hawaii in general.”

The plantation located off Hana Highway and mauka of Hana Airport has two small structures, where all the chocolate is produced by only five workers. The family makes every piece by hand, which totaled roughly 1,200 bars last year.

Owner Francine Frost has dreams of wrapping 10,000 this year.

“This is the first year where maybe we can make some money,” she said.

Francine and Robert Frost originally founded the company in 1978 after buying the property from Hana Ranch. The couple owned a flight school in Kahului and on Oahu and tried various agricultural ventures on the property until finally settling on cacao in 2005.

The couple bought cacao pods from growers across the state and began growing them outside their Hana home. Their son, Aldon Frost, and his wife, Alyssa, would later join the company along with farm handler Randy Orozco.

The company began the business by selling its beans to chocolate makers around the state. They began making their own chocolate bars after building a production center and fermentation and drying facility at the end of last year.

Hana Gold chocolate can be found at Down to Earth and Sweet Paradise Chocolate in Wailea. Aldon Frost spent time last year training under master chocolatier Virginia Douglas at the Wailea store.

“We really wanted to have everything Hana-centric,” Francine Frost said. “I want it to be a Hana product and everything made there.”

The cacao tree is native to the dense tropical Amazon forests and was first cultivated by the Mayas of Yucatan and the Aztecs of Mexico, according to Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate. It gained prominence and commercial value when Aztec emperor Montezuma began eating the beans that were prepared in a process called “chocolatl.”

Cacao would be brought to Hawaii three centuries later, around 1850, and was later introduced on Maui in the early 1900s, according to HawaiiCacao.com.

Walking through the plantation Thursday, Francine Frost cut off one of her cacao pods to show its current form. The pods vary in color from red, orange, yellow and sometimes violet.

“They’re really pretty when you harvest them,” she said. “It’s the same variety just different color. I don’t get it either. I’m like, ‘Huh?’ “

The plantation has three different types of cacao trees: criollo, forastero and trinitario. Criollo dominates the fields, though, and Francine Frost cracked one open to show its insides.

“Nothing like chocolate, but smells pretty good,” she said, lifting the seeds that are covered in white mucilagelike coating. “It tastes like a lemon.”

The exposed beans are then put inside a box to ferment and later placed on racks to dry off and heat up. After roasting the beans, they are ground and separated from their shells leaving the pure cocoa bean, known as “nibs.”

The nibs are ground up and mixed with cocoa butter until they are ready to be slowly heated and cooled, which will prepare the chocolate to be poured into bar-shaped containers.

“What we want in the end is to pour out a bar that is very glossy and pretty, and has a good snap,” Francine Frost said. “And, of course, the taste.”

Doctors have attributed dark chocolate to lower blood pressure, lowering people’s risk to heart disease and other inflammation-fighting benefits.

Aldon Frost touted the health benefits of dark chocolate. He provides samples during tours, comparing Hana Gold’s chocolate to others. The bars are 70 percent chocolate, and most of the bars boil down to a handful ingredients, compared with Hershey’s bars and other companies that have dozens of ingredients.

“It’s like a paragraph of ingredients,” he said. “We just want to keep it to four ingredients and lift the cacao bean on the pedestal. Put the focus on the bean so people know what real cacao tastes like.”

Guests of Travaasa Hana can get a taste of Hana Gold’s chocolate from the plantation itself via tours that began last week. The 45-minute tour is $30 per person and takes visitors through the 13 steps of making chocolate, which culminates in the tasting of various chocolates.

“We’re very happy to work with them,” Francine Frost said of Travaasa. “They’re a very good hotel, and it’s nice to have something in Hana, that’s all Hana.”

Francine Frost has larger dreams than simply giving tours. She hopes to build a retail space in the future. There also are plans to grow another 2,000 to 3,000 trees over the next several years.

Hawaii’s chocolate industry as a whole is growing, with Dole being the largest producer of chocolate on Oahu, Francine Frost said. Dole plans to increase its chocolate production and works with other plantations on the island to help produce better beans, she said.

Aldon Frost said he tasted Dole’s new chocolate bar during the Hawaii Chocolate and Cacao Association’s meeting earlier this month at the University of Hawaii Maui College, saying, “It’s good.” He said he hopes other chocolate plantations will join.

“We want to show people that Hana can make the best chocolate,” Aldon Frost said. “Just like how certain areas of California are known for wine, we really want Hawaii to be known as a place for chocolate.”

* Chris Sugidono can be reached at csugidono@mauinews.com.