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Mahi Pono to bring more crops to packing facility

Company currently packing citrus; coffee, potatoes, onions up next

M.P. Packing Co. workers grade Mahi Pono limes by size in the M.P. Packing Co. processing center on Oct. 25 in Puunene. The 117,000-square-foot former warehouse is located near shuttered Puunene Mill and was built decades ago by Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. — The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo
A box of Persian limes is automatically whisked along a conveyor belt on its way to being sealed to ship. — The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo
Limes rumble along during processing at the M.P. Packing Co. facility on Oct. 25. Mahi Pono Vice President of Harvest and Post-Harvest Operations Chris Miller said the facility uses a blend of automation and manual labor to grade, clean, dry, size, count and pack the limes. He said Persian limes were being processed and the company also grows Tahitian limes on the 10,000 acres it has planted with the fruit. The limes are currently being sold on Oahu and Maui. Miller said the company will be processing onions and coffee in the building soon and a cold storage area is being constructed. He said the processing center will be used while a larger facility is built off Pulehu Road near the intersection with Hansen Road. — The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo
Miller
Workers install a strip curtain door at the renovated facility Wednesday. — The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo
In a 117,000-square-foot warehouse behind the old Puunene Mill lies Mahi Pono's new packing facility, which will now make it easier to pack some of its produce for sale.  At its facility, launched in September, Mahi Pono can now mechanically rinse, brush and shine its Maui-grown limes and prepare them for distribution.  Prior to the facility opening, that type of work was done by hand, limiting the amount of produce the company could sell. "It's a startup, so what we have is some machinery that is kind of like a car wash for fruit," Chris Miller, Mahi Pono's vice president of harvest and post-harvest operations, said in describing the packaging facility last week.   Currently the Puunene facility is packing limes and lemons only. Miller said the limes get picked and brought into the facility in big bins. Then the bins are dumped out and the limes are "graded" by hand, with the badly wind-scarred fruit getting removed from the bunches for sale. In the future there will be "electronic grading," but for now workers sort the fruit.  The fruit then gets rinsed with a pressure nozzle system, brushed, shined and sent through a dryer. It is then separated, by hand, into No. 1 and No. 2 fruit, with the latter being less expensive.   "Depends on the customer what they want to pay," he said of the different grades. "At the end of the day, they are all limes and they are all juicy."  The produce gets boxed and shipped to distributors, which are currently Kula Produce on Maui and Armstrong Produce on Oahu. More of the machine-prepared produce will also be hitting the supermarkets soon, Miller said.  The packing facility is another step for the farming company that owns and operates approximately 41,000 acres of agricultural land in Central Maui, formerly under the ownership of Alexander & Baldwin and used for Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. operations, which ended in 2016.  As of August, Mahi Pono had planted more than 1.8 million trees on approximately 10,000 acres of land, according to its website. It had also prepared more than 9,000 acres of grass pasture land to support its Maui Cattle Co. grass-fed beef operations.  Currently food crops in the ground include lime, lemon, orange, tangerine, coffee, avocado, macadamia nut, ulu, onion, kale, lettuce, watermelon, bananas, coconut, lilikoi and mangoes.  Mahi Pono officials said that next year they will be expanding cultivation of avocados and mangoes. But they also need to build deer fencing around those crops. Abundant axis deer have long posed an issue for ranchers and farmers, devastating crops and pasture land that are already scarce due to drought. In the future more crops will be headed to Mahi Pono's packing facility. At the warehouse last week, workers were packing Persian limes. The company also grows Tahitian limes.  "It's a lime and lemon packing operation," Miller said of the facility now. "In the future we will have out of the same house, we will have onions and coffee and also avocados are planned but a little far out there."  He estimated that the packing operation should be handling the onions and coffee and even potatoes around January.  The operations are familiar to Miller, who comes from a fourth-generation citrus-growing family from California on his father's side and a fourth-generation cattle-ranching family on his mother's side. "So I grew up with all of this grounding," Miller said.  He also worked with his dad, packing lemons and running operations. Miller assumed many places in the lemon operation, from being in the fields, running the packing operations and doing sales.  He also has a degrees in agricultural engineering and in agriculture business.  Miller's last job was at Blue Diamond Almond, where he was director of grower relations and primarily worked with growers in the field, finding out how much almonds they would be bringing in and what they were going to do with them.   Using that information, Miller would then determine with the plant facility where almonds would be distributed. "The reason why I came here is for the challenge," Miller said, noting he was recruited by Mahi Pono and was excited when he was hired. "Who doesn't want to live on Maui?" he said.  Miller said that he came over to spend some time on the island before starting and "fell in love with the place" and its people.  * Staff Writer Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com. Staff Writer Matthew Thayer contributed to this report.  [gallery ids="1145050,1145049,1145048,1145047,1145046"]

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