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Big Island
ag firm gets high-
tech partner

The merged company will market
skin products and other
creations on the 'Net

By Rod Thompson
Star-Bulletin

KEAAU, Hawaii -- A marriage of papayas and the Internet with a possible whiff of rambutan perfume will mark a new east Hawaii business.

Officials of Aloha Hawaii Enterprises LLC, a diversified agricultural export business, and Rad Cubed Corp., an Internet technology company, announced their merger last week at Shipman Business Park south of Hilo.

The new company will be called Digital 24X7 Inc., a name indicating services available 24 hours per day, seven days a week, said Richard Nelson, president of Aloha Hawaii.

Rad Cubed will maintain a separate identity within the new company. "We're going to build a business high-tech data center in the community," said its president, John DeBriere.

The logic behind Digital 24X7 is to use the Internet to market the products the company creates, Nelson said.

One of those products is Lehua Skin Care, soon to be advertised in a nationwide "infomercial," said Alicia Hapai, cosmetics director for the company. The product uses papaya enzymes from the Big Island and collagen from off-island sea kelp. The company said it also plans to collaborate with Chanel in making perfumes with scents extracted from Big Island fruits and plants.

Aloha Hawaii Chairman Alec Keith, a scientist and businessman who moved to the Big Island three years ago, is one of the driving forces behind this array of ideas. A University of Hawaii at Hilo chemistry professor, Keith gave a $1.8 million donation to the school last week. He is the owner of about 150 patents.

Keith remains chairman of Gray*Star Inc. which plans to make food irradiators on the mainland, but at Aloha Hawaii he has been working on two nonirradiation ways to kill fruit flies in papayas.

The space to perform this research and house business ideas is the 40,000-square-foot food distribution center created by Sure Save Supermarkets before the company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year and sold the facility to Aloha Hawaii.

Aloha Hawaii also bought a vacant 20,000-square-foot former home furnishings store across the street and is looking at a third facility in Shipman Business Park, Nelson said. The company has 518 acres in lower Puna which it will sublease in smaller parcels to growers of papayas, awa, noni, or other commodities, he said.