A New Englander named James Drummond Dole graduated from Harvard in 1899 with degrees in agriculture and business and decided to seek his fortune in Hawaii, where his cousin Sanford was governor. His unlikely scheme was to harvest pineapples.

Pineapples are not native to Hawaii. They were imported from South America in 1813 and they thrived. In the days before commercial aviation and refrigeration, however, perishable pineapples would, well, perish, before they reached the contiguous United States. Dole's plan was to can the fruit in Hawaii and ship it back home.

In 1900, he bought 61 acres of farmland at auction for $4,000. A year later he incorporated the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, built a cannery in 1903, and produced 1,893 cases of canned pineapple in the first year.

In 1907, he built a larger cannery in Honolulu, which was closer to the port and the can factory. Unfortunately, economic hard times in the states reduced the demand for what was then considered a luxury food. So Dole and eight other pineapple packers pooled their pennies. As the Hawaiian Pineapple Growers Association, they launched a $50,000 campaign advertising not one brand but Hawaiian pineapples in general, something that was not common practice at the time. Pineapple demand skyrocketed.

A major breakthrough occurred in 1913 when Dole engineer Henry Ginaca invented a machine that could peel and core 35 pineapples per minute. Until then, each pineapple had to be cored by hand. Dole developed the pineapple business into Hawaii's second largest industry.

The first product to bear the Dole trademark was not the canned pineapple but canned pineapple juice, which was sold during the Great Depression. Dole retired in 1948 and died in 1958, the year that Hawaii became the 50th state.