For meeting attendees, Hawaii Island offers abundant opportunities to enjoy the local agricultural bounty and also to take part in CSR (corporate social responsibility) activities, many of which are geared toward protecting the island’s diverse but fragile ecosystem.
“For groups meeting here, sustainability and CSR are big—companies are telling us that they want to participate,” says Frank Manchen, director of sales and marketing for the Hilton Waikiloa Village. “The interest is not just in things like bike building, but in activities that are truly local—like planting taro in the Waipio Valley, cleaning up beaches, planting trees. They ask us for guidance and we advise them.”
Debbie Hogan, director of sales for the Big Island Visitors Bureau, also notes a growing interest among groups in helping maintain Hawaii Island’s physical environment.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for CSR here—if someone expresses an interest, we pick it up and run with it,” she says. “Because of the weather, we get invasive plants who are suffocating the natural vegetation. We can put something together that helps restore the natural landscape.”
Opportunities for working with local communities are also abundant, she says, citing a day event held during a recent meeting of VMware, a software company, based at the Fairmont Orchid. During the event, 120 attendees went out to six schools to donate computers, software and backpacks for the students. They also helped with beautification projects on the school grounds.
“The response was phenomenal—the company president got an e-mail from an attendee saying it was the best event they’d ever done,” Hogan says.
With over 5,000 farms and ranches on Hawaii Island, producing everything from grass-fed beef to vanilla beans, local food and agricultural experiences can also be part of the agenda.
“Seventy-five percent of the food produced in Hawaii comes from this island,” Manchen says. “Our climate variations allow for a tremendous variety of fruit, not just tropical fruit like pineapples and mangoes, but strawberries, which are grown in the highlands.”
Opportunities for groups to get a real taste of Hawaii Island are offered by Earth Bound Tours (www.earthboundtours.com), which features a variety of excursions built around farm visits and chef-prepared meals using island-grown ingredients. The tour company was founded by Jim and Tracy Reddekopp, owners of the Hawaiian Vanilla Co., which grows vanilla beans and produces vanilla food and beauty products on a farm located on the lower slopes of Mauna Kea.
Not surprisingly, a signature offering of Earth Bound Tours is the Hawaiian Vanilla Experience Luncheon, which according to Jim Reddekopp, allows participants to “taste, smell, hear, touch, see and learn all about vanilla and the journey we have been on since we bought our first vanilla plant in 1998.”
During the tour, participants enjoy a lunch where foods are accented by farm-made specialties such as vanilla-mango chutney aioli, vanilla-raspberry vinaigrette, vanilla-honey-peppered pecans, vanilla tea and vanilla bean ice cream. The tours also include a presentation on how vanilla is grown and a visit to the farm’s vanillery—an acre of shade houses where the beans are processed.
Other options from Earth Bound Tours include the Big Island Eruption of Flavor, a tour on the Kona side of the island that focuses on locally produced coffee, chocolate and vanilla, and Big Island Hamakua Coast, a tour departing from Hilo that includes visits to farms producing honey, goat cheese and tomatoes.
