Kona has a unique weather pattern that is perfect for growing coffee! See the red outlined area on the west side of the island in the image above? This is known as the Kona Coffee Belt – this area on the southern slopes of Hualalai and Mauna Loa volcanos is the specific region where growing conditions are prime. Here, Kona Coffee has developed and flourished over 175 years, thriving in the unique cycle of sunshine in the morning, rainfall in the afternoon and mild nights combined with nourishing, mineral rich volcanic soil.

Kauai Coffee: Berry Good!

Reviving ancient wisdom, Shaun Roberts is using the red coffee berry to create a super healthy drink.

As the legend goes, there was once a humble Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi who followed his goats wherever they roamed. If they were thirsty, they would find the deepest watering hole; if they were sleepy, they would find a cool spot never touched by the sun; if they were hungry, they knew which bushes were flowering with fruits. The goatherd trusted his goats the way old women trusted the wise oracle in the cave, and the village people noticed Kaldi was acting more and more like the goats he kept.

One day two young boys thought they would play a trick on old Kaldi and they walked long into the day to find the herd grazing in a distant valley. By the time they arrived they were so exhausted from the heat and crumbling roads, they gave up their prank and arrived in the shade of Kaldi’s herd, begging for a sip of water and a piece of flattened bread. Kaldi was a gracious man and after giving a drink of water, he plucked a handful of berries from a nearby bush and  said, “This will replenish you faster than any bit of bread or dried piece of meat.”

The two boys laughed at old Kaldi. “Save those bitter berries for your goats, old man!” they said.

“Ah, the ignorance of youth. Watch.” And Kaldi swiftly began to chew on the berries he had offered. Soon the old goatherd was dancing and singing the songs of his youth, chirping and climbing a nearby tree with the glee of a child.

“Don’t you see?” he called to the boys still exhausted from their long walk, ” my goats know the secrets to these cherries: vitality and good health!”

“What’s to lose?” one boy said to the other, and began to munch on the bright-red fruit. In no time at all, he, too was romping about as if he had just woken from a night of cool sleep.

The boys convinced Kaldi to bring a bushel of coffee cherries back to the village, and so began the celebrity of the coffee plant in the Ethiopian desert.

Flash forward a millennia or two to the island of Hawaii – the only state in the nation to grow the beloved bush and produce some of the world’s finest grinds. What has long-since been forgotten by the latte-mocha-frappuccino set has been rediscovered by Kauai entrepreneur and coffee cherry guru Shaun Roberts. The Ethiopian goatherd bad tit right: It’s not the bean inside the fruit where all the vitality and benefit lie, but the fruit  of the plant itself (called the cherries or berries).

KonaRed Coffee Fruit Wellness Elixir is the product that Shaun Roberts and his partners in Sandwich Isles Trading Company have developed, produced and introduced as the next “super-fruit” antioxidant hero.

“Part of our mission,” he says, “is to educate people about the benefits of antioxidants – it’s a commonly used term, but not many people know exactly what antioxidants do and why they’re important.”

Imagine you have a room in your house crawling with termites. You could call the local pest-removal company and spray chemicals to neutralize those multiplying bugs, but instead someone gives you a cage full of colorful butterflies that love the taste of termites. They tell you to release the butterflies, close the door and in no time the problem will be solved. Nature fighting nature.

Antioxidants do the same job of gobbling up free radicals, just as the butterflies might do to the termites. If there are too many free radicals multiplying in our bodies, cancer, diabetes and other degenerative disease take hold. But if you can neutralize and balance those harmful scavengers with healthy habits or powerful superfoods (like coffee cherries), you’ll have a good chance of restoring balance.

Roberts explained that after a year of testing and refinement, their product made from otherwise thrown-away fruit of Hawaii’s coffee cherry, claimed a whopping number of ORAC units (Oxygen Radical Absorbence Capacity). Where powerful pomegrantat punches a score of about 11,000 and awesome acai about 16,000, Robers found his coffee cherries claim 407,600 ORACs for the same 100 grams.

“Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity is a method of measuring antioxidant capacities in biological samples, jointly developed by the National Institutes on Aging and the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging,” Roberts states. “It is believed that high ORAC foods possess the power to slow down or prevent detrimental changes to the body and brain caused by aging and illness (free-radical damage).

Roberts didn’t move to Kauai to develop health foods or start an antioxidant revolution. He and his wife of 12 years, Dana Roberts, had just finished their master’s degrees in economics and marketing (respectively) at San Diego State University. Their mutual love for scuba diving and ocean made Hawaii a dream destination.

“I had been coming to Kauai my whole life,” explains Roberts. “My grandparents started taking me on vacation here when I was just 2 years old. I feel like I kind of grew up on Kauai.”

In 2001, after working in the “green cleaning products” business in Southern California, the couple and their daughter decided it was time for a change. “We had been here on vacation and made the decision. We put an offer on a house here and went back to California to sell everything else.” Shaun, Dana and Jordan (a baby then) Roberts moved to Kauai with the thought they might open a scuba-diving business.

“We had met 16 years ago at a scuba dive shop – we were both instructors,” he says.

Yet with business minds and strong ambitions, the couple saw a different possibility emerge. “We launched Malie Organics in 2004″ – the delectable all-Hawaiian sourced beauty line featured at Halele’a Spa at Princeville’s St. Regis Resort, as well as many stores around the Islands. “We wanted to utilize the amazing ingredients and resources from the islands and produce the highest quality spa and beauty products. No one else was doing it on the level we envisioned.”

Four years later, with a  successful business and another child, Nathan, Shaun was ready for a new business venture.

“Twenty million pounds of coffee fruit is thrown away each year in Kona and Kauai,” he says. “We want to take this wasted material and re-purpose it into something incredibly beneficial – this is a sustainable, value-added product.”

As Roberts began to do the research, he discovered the ancient Ethiopian drink called qishar. Made from the cherry, not the bean, “this drink was taken by Ethiopians on long sea voyages and treks, it kept them healthy and able to travel with very little food,” he explains. “My business partner and mad chemist, Steven Schorr or Bioponic Phytoceuticals, began to process the cherries into hydrosol distillations and freeze dried powder. We went through a very expensive year of research and development, then professional testing and what we found was those ancient Ethiopians knew what they were doing!”

The coffee bean is only second to oil on the world’s commodities trade, but very few of us have ever tasted the fruit that shelters the bean of our morning cup.

“It was definitely one of those ‘aha’ moments,” says Roberts. “Immediately we saw the potential for selling the raw ingredient as well as producing a consumer product.”

Roberts named his company KonaRed and got to work. “There are different varietals of the coffee plant – here on Kauai the fruit turns yellow, while the Kona varietal turns red. Thus the names: KonaRed and KauaiGold.”

KonaRed was launched with fruit from Mountain Thunder and Greenwell Farms on Kona, and Roberts says he plans to use next year’s Kauai Coffee harvest to product the first line of Kauai Gold.

“We are calling on a multitude of mainstream companies to use this as an additive to their product,” he says. Lion Coffee is launching its KonaRed “flavor” this season. “They use the antioxidant ingredient the way they use a flavor like vanilla or hazelnut; it’s sprayed onto the bean after roasting and then diffuses into the cup of coffee.” Other non-coffee companies such as Ocean Spray are in Robert’s sights: “Originally I thought we could just sell the fruit, but now we have 13 major ingredient/additive accounts with more planned.”

Juggling family and two major entrepreneurial ventures keeps Dana and Shaun very busy. “If I wasn’t running all this I’d be hiking in Koke’e, fishing or at Polihale Beach. We love Kauai – it’s an incredibly special place. We are so happy to be raising our kids here. San Clemente was just too crowded.”

He says that making sure he puts the cell phone away and consciously carving out time for his personal world is the secret of their success.

They applied for and were given the state economic development grant, financing the rest of the company on their own. With KonaRed, they’ve had investors and partners. “Having partners makes the responsibility that much greater, but it also gives us a lot of confidence to keep pushing to make this a reality. I believe in this product.”

Roberts says KonaRed passed toxicology testes with flying colors (no amounts of being toxic for consumption) and without hesitation gives some of the elixir to his children. “If they come home from school with sniffles, I give them a half serving of the KonaRed elixer and bam! The cold is gone by morning… In a sense, we are reviving a drink once cherished and utilized by ancient peoples,” he says. “Our job is to make an excellent product and educate the consumer about its benefits.”

This article was written by Keya Guimaraes and published in Hawaii’s local MidWeek Newspaper on August 18, 2010

For more information visit www.konared.com

Lion Coffee Antioxidant Rich Pure Choices comes in 4 flavors!

PURE CHOICES – LION Coffee’s Revolutionary New Antioxidant Rich Brew

LION Coffee, producer of Hawaii’s finest premium gourmet coffees, is pleased to introduce its new line of antioxidant rich coffees called ”PURE CHOICES”. One cup of LION’s new Pure Choices coffee contains more than double the daily USDA recommended antioxidants, bringing an additional new roar to each cup of LION Coffee.

This unique and revolutionary blend of coffee is the result of LION Coffee’s alliance with KonaRed coffee Fruit — the sole supplier of Kona coffee fruit in the world. The fruit, or “coffee cherry” of the coffee plant surrounds, protects and nourishes the seed (coffee bean). Highly perishable the coffee fruit was previously discarded after harvest. KonaRed developed a means of preserving the coffee fruit at the height of its nutrient power, thus allowing them to produce its amazingly antioxidant rich liquid extract.

KonaRed only uses coffee fruit from prestegious family farms famous for their prisine growing conditions and natural farming techniques. After an intensive Research & Development phase, LION Coffee developed a method to convert the nutrient-rich coffee fruit into an enhancement that could be added back into our coffee. The addition of the super-ingredient KonaRed Coffee Fruit in Hawaii’s favorite premium gourmet coffees’ has provided a powerful antioxidant boost to the brew while maintaining the same great LION taste.

The introduction of the antioxidant rich Kona Coffee Fruit represents a major new development in the revolution of the coffee industry, ”Not since the introduction of flavored coffee has there been such a significant innovation, ” says Jim Wayman, president of Hawaii Coffee Company, which makes both LION Coffee and Royal Kona Coffee and is the largest roaster of Kona Coffee inthe world.  ”I am excited about this opportunity.  We are able to provide our usual great cup of gourmet coffee that provides an easy and affordable way for consumers to get more than the daily recommendation of  antioxidants,” continues Wayman.  LION Coffee continues to be recognized as a pioneer and leader in the coffee industry.

Shaun Roberts, CEO of KonaRed, states: “I am thrilled to partner with LION Coffee, Hawaii’s premier retail brand of coffee.  This new product, which offers a high-antioxidant coffee, is truely a coffee revolution.”

LION Coffee will offer four of its favorite premium gourmet coffees utilizing the 100% natural KonaRed coffee fruit:  Original, French Roast, Coconuty and Vanilla Macadamia.  Fans of these Lion Coffees can expect the same great LION Taste along with more than double the daily USDA recommended antioxidants.

Buy Lion Coffee’s PURE CHOICES by clicking here.

Learn more about KonaRed on our website! Click Here!

Sunrise News in the Morning! Click here to link to Hawaii News Now article: The company that brings you Lion Coffee and Royal Kona brand has something new. Coffee with extra anti-oxidants.

Have you tried Malie’s Organic Anti-Aging Firming Elasticity Cream? It is powered with KonaRed and the amazing antioxidant powers of the coffee fruit. This product came to market in early 2010 and is starting to get a lot of press. This cream is one-of-a-kind and uses the intelligence and power of nature to help reverse the signs of aging!

Created by nature to shield the coffee seed from intense sun and harsh environmental stress, this antioxidant formula:
- Prevents free radicals from causing cell damage.
- Neutralizes inflammation and repairs cells.
- Increases firmness while reducing lines, wrinkles and hyperpigmentation.

Malie has sample packets of this powerful and effective cream so you can try it before you commit to buying. We guarantee you’ll love it! Go to www.malie.com to find a retailer near you so you can ask your local retailer about the cream and get a sample!

Lion Coffee will soon introduce a new line called Pure Choices that it touts as having “more than double the daily USDA-recommended antioxidants,” according to a publicist’s e-mail.

Lion parent Hawaii Coffee Co. has developed the new line, using KonaRed coffee fruit from Kauai-based Sandwich Isles Trading Co. Inc., which does business as KonaRed.

Search for keyword “antioxidant” in beverage industry publications and most results will reference acai, goji berry, pomegranate and other fruit sources, but coffee comes from fruit, too. Coffee beans actually come from coffee berries, which are also referred to as coffee cherries.

Beverage Industry magazine managing editor Jennifer Zegler reported that “in addition to its natural caffeine, coffee beverages are also sought after for their antioxidant benefits.”

Tea, made with leaves, also has antioxidant properties, the publication reported.

Lion says the antioxidant-rich blend is a first in the industry, and predicts the line will create a huge stir in the gourmet coffee industry. Not yet on store shelves, the Pure Choices line will be introduced with advertising that breaks Aug. 9.

See the article in the Honolulu Star Advertiser by clicking here.

Pacific Business News – June 25, 2010

Kauai Business Emerges from Grassroots

With one successful skin-care products company already under their belt, serial entrepreneurs Shaun and Dana Roberts sat on their Kilohana farm in the spring of 2008 devising ways to expand.

Despite creeping signs of a recession, the husband-and-wife owners of Kauai-based Malie Organics decided to pursue research and development of a new product that maximizes the uses of the coffee fruit – said to contain antioxidant benefits to rival the acai berry – and market it as a wellness product.

But raising capital as banks were tightening up amid the credit freeze proved to be a challenge.

So they did it grassroots – by reaching out to friends and relatives and dipping into their own personal savings – for more than $1 million in startup capital that primarily went towards research and development and product testing at major labs on the Mainland, including Brunswick Laboratories.

The Roberts and their business partner, Steven Schorr, launched Sandwich Isles Trading Co., which does business asKonaRed Coffee Fruit, in August 2008.

“It was very grassroots and I feel very responsible right now,” Shaun Roberts said. “It was straight up family and friends. We were fortunate that, based on our past successes, we were really able to get that first round of capital in order to really do the research … [and] get all the science done to know what we’re selling.”

KonaRed uses parts of Kona coffee cherries, the red skin and sweet pulp left behind after the coffee beans are removed, converting them into concentrated powders and liquids.

Roberts estimates that Hawaii coffee farmers throw away 10,000 tons of coffee fruit a year.

So, over the course of a year, he developed supplier relationships with the various coffee farmers on the Big Island and Kauai to buy “hundreds of thousands of dollars” worth of coffee fruit and set up a processing facility on Maui.

“It’s a sustainable business model and a good opportunity for us and for the industry as a whole that gives coffee farmers another value-added product out of their crop,” he said.

Today, KonaRed is a bulk raw ingredient company that sells its trademarked coffee fruit as whole powder, liquid extract and a freeze-dried powder that can be added to food, beverages and personal care products.

Powders cost $1.99 for a four-gram pack and liquid extracts cost $3.50 for a two-ounce bottle.

It already has signed deals with companies such as Lion Coffee, Waialua Soda Works and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Robertssaid.

He declined to disclose revenue projections, saying the company only recently began to generate a revenue stream.
“We really had to put our reputation on the line to get that capital in the door,” he said. “The opportunity was worth it and we continue to be in the capital-raising market because our sales cycles are fairly long. Let’s just say that with the millions ofpounds of coffee fruit as a finished product, our goal is to be selling that out.”

Roberts said a newer challenge is educating people and capitalizing on the market awareness of health benefits of superfruits. He’s also working on international distribution agreements to take KonaRed overseas. In January, the company signed a distribution agreement with Wedar Nutrasource for China and Taiwan and is finalizing an agreement for the Japan Market.

Jason Campbell, president of Waialua Soda Works on Oahu’s North Shore, which just launched its sixth and newest soda flavor featuring KonaRed in March, said the product further extends the Hawaii brand in the global food and beverage market.

By Linda Chiem

(Download a high res image of this article on our press page, click here)

Hawaii Magazine – April 2010

Kona Coffee Energy Shot

Need a boost? Try KonaRed Coffee Fruit. It’s not a coffee. It’s an energy drink made from the fruit, not the beans, of Kona coffee trees. Usually coffee cherries, as tehy are called, are discarded. But according to the Sandwich Isles Trading Co., Inc., the fruit has a high level of antioxidants. The coffee cherries are harvested from the Kona district on the BIg Island and taken to processing facilities nearby.

Click here to visit the press section of www.konared.com

- Tony Cline (Professional Football Player)