Inventor Henry Ginaca

During the 1900s, three pineapple canneries operated on Kaua‘i. 

Hawaiian Canneries, which canned pineapples from 1913 to 1962, was located in Kapa‘a where Pono Kai now stands.

Another, Hawaiian Fruit Packers, operated its cannery on Kawaihau Road in Kapahi from 1932 to 1973. Only its warehouses remain standing. 

And in Lawa‘i, at the present Old Lawa‘i Cannery location, Kaua‘i Pineapple Company produced canned pineapple from 1907 to 1964.

In each of these canneries, pineapples were processed by inventor Henry Ginaca’s amazing pineapple processing machines.

Comprising a marvelously complex assortment of gears, chains, cams, cutters, and corers, Ginaca’s machines sized pineapples, cut off their ends, peeled them, retained crushed pineapple and juice from the skins and removed the fibrous cores.

The earliest Ginaca machines increased production to about 50 pineapples per minute, a rate which eliminated hand-operated pineapple processing machines by which skilled workers cored, peeled, juiced, and sliced pineapples at a rate of 10 to 15 per minute. Improvements increased production to 100 per minute.

With Ginaca machines, entrepreneurs were able to process increased quantities of pineapple, making it practical to build canneries equipped for large-scale production and profit.

Born either in California or Nevada in 1876, Henry Ginaca, the son of an Italian civil engineer father and a French mother, became a machinist apprentice at the Union Iron Works in San Francisco as a teenager.

He was designing engines at Honolulu Iron Works in 1911, when James Dole, founder of Hawaiian Pineapple Company, hired him to develop a machine that could quickly prepare pineapples for canning.

Within a year, Ginaca had created his first successful design and made improvements until 1914, when he went to California to become a gold miner, a venture at which he failed.

Henry Ginaca died of influenza in California in 1918.