Our family owned a chip company started as a backyard business over 50 years ago, in a small wooden shack in the town of Captain Cook on the Big Island of Hawaii. Passing the hand-crafted techniques to its present day owners the chips are still handmade in special batches. This excitng process we call “spinning”, actually spin dries the cooked chips resulting in the tastiest and cripest chip. Just one bite and you’ll know why!

History

“In 1991 I bought the Business from the Deguchi family, since Mr. and Mrs. Deguchi were going to retire. They had run the Kitch’n Cook’d potato chip business out of a shack in their backyard for some 50 years. I then moved the business to a building that was about a block away from their house in Captain Cook (Kona). We stayed at that location for 10 years and manufactured the potato chips out of the same equipment that the Deguchi’s had used.
In September of 2001, we relocated the business to my brother-in-law, Dwight Manago’s new building that he had built for us so that we could expand our business. We were now located right next to the Manago Hotel, which is where we are today. We now had a huge area to manufacture our product, and it is at that time that we decided to automate our equipment. We also decided to change our packaging since a lot of people were confusing us with the Kitch’n Cook’d on Maui. We simplified our name to Kona Potato Chips and created a new Hawaiian look to our packaged.
Since we had such a large area, we decided to create a retail section that we would filled with our Kona Potato Chips and a a lot of local snacks. This is when our sister company, Petroglyphs in Paradise was born. Petroglyphs in Paradise is our snack line and our gift basket business. We now have about 100 items that we carry in our retail section. The most popular items under the Petroglyphs in Paradise name would be our Furikake Chips and our “Sumo Style” Shrimp Chips.
Jerome Furukawa
President, Kona Potato Chips