Failed coffee plan made James Dole the Pineapple King

In 1899, Harvard graduate James Drummond Dole arrived in Hawaii hoping to grow coffee. He bought 61 acres in Wahiawā on Oahu, but coffee failed. Just over two months after his arrival, Honolulu was quarantined during a bubonic plague outbreak and Chinatown was burned to contain the disease.

Dole turned to pineapples. Fresh fruit spoiled on the long voyage to the US mainland, so he turned to canning. In 1901 he founded the Hawaiian Pineapple Company with $20,000. By 1903 fewer than 2,000 cases had been packed by hand. A machine invented by Henry Ginaca that could peel and core 100 pineapples a minute transformed production.

In 1922 Dole bought the entire island of Lānaʻi, making it a major pineapple-producing centre. The company nearly collapsed during the Great Depression and was restructured in 1932. Dole remained chairman but lost control. The Economictimes notes the irony: the man who came to grow coffee built a global fruit empire around a different crop.