Building An Empire From A Beehive

The line of perspiring shoppers dying for some icy relief wraps around the corner of the Wicked Hi Slush stand at FarmLovers Farmers' Markets on Oʻahu. 

Patrons quench their thirst with the stand’s two signature offerings: a satisfying slush made of local fruit, ice and local honey and a warm welcome from co-founder Ashley Moran, who shines more radiantly than the Hawaiʻian sun. 

Moran’s partner, Brandon Slowey, grew up beekeeping. They created the honey slush that launched their burgeoning brand as an excuse to teach customers about beekeeping. 

“It was like something healthy and wholesome, shaved ice was popular, it’s hot as heck out here, so let’s make a product that gets people thinking about what’s in their food and why,” Moran said. 

“Wicked” is slang for “really” or “very” in the couple’s native Massachusetts. “Hi” refers to Hawaiʻi.

In just five years, Moran and Slowey have advanced from serving slushies at one farmers market to running slush stands at four farmers markets – in Waimea, Pearlridge, Kakaʻako and Kailua – a catering business that services six to eight events a month, and a pizza stand, Wicked Hi Pizza, at the Waimea market. 

The duo’s latest venture is their first brick-and-mortar outlet: Wicked Hi Cafe. They opened the full-service café on Nov. 1. It replaces the North Shore Coffee Bar in the historic Koga Theatre in Waialua that now features a wellness floor upstairs and small, local food vendors downstairs. 

“We’ve got that farmers market vibe in here,” Moran said. “It was a really comfortable transition.”

Amidst all this growth, the couple continues to center their offerings around their passion for honey. 

“It was always going to be based around sustainability and using real, fresh, local ingredients,” Moran said. “We really wanted to stick to only using honey. We gave ourselves, I wouldn’t say confines, but we had some serious standards that we wanted to hold ourselves to.” 

Ultimately, Moran and Sloweyʻs mission is to promote sustainability, to create community and to serve quality. 

Slowey came to Oʻahu in 2007 to attend Chaminade University. After a two-year stint, he returned home for five years before bringing the love of his life, Moran, back to Oʻahu in 2014 for a month. The couple trolled the local farmers markets and took farm tours. They returned to the East Coast in love with the island. 

“I was captivated by it,” Moran remembers. “When we went back after our vacation, we gave ourselves nine months. We were like, ‘We’re giving birth to the dream,’ like, ‘We’re doing this.’”

Back east, the couple worked a bunch of odd jobs. Slowey, a hobby farmer, was an electrician and installed irrigation on the side. Moran was a graphic designer and bartender. She used to bring jars of honey that Slowey had harvested into the bar to make drink specials with it.  

“We always had multiple things going on, and we were just, like, over it,” Moran said. “We wanted to do something for ourselves that would give us something to live for.”

Slowey and Moran quickly hatched a business plan and then headed back to Oʻahu. Within two months, they were slinging slush at the Waimea farmers market. 

“It really grew naturally,” Moran said. “Just when it was starting to get hard, another gig would happen or another event would come through, and everything would just kind of fall into place.” 

They elevated their offerings with a beachfront pop-up for a year at the renowned Turtle Bay Resort on the North Shore while Roy’s restaurant was under construction. Then, a Japanese company put the tiny slush stand on the international map when it flew the couple to Japan to participate in the Made in Hawaiʻi Festival. 

Slowey and Moran next started getting passionate about fermentation. Particularly, sourdough pizza. After studying with a local baker, they traveled to Italy to learn directly from restaurants in Naples and the Amalfi Coast. 

“We just really wanted to pay homage to how it has always been done,” Moran said. 

Three months after the couple returned, they opened Wicked Hi Pizza. One pizza even features drizzled honey.

Promoting sustainability on Oʻahu inspired Slowey and Moran’s original business plan. 

Slowey jumped back into his lifelong passion of beekeeping when they moved to the island. For the first two years of business, Wicked Hi Slush used Manoa Honey Co., a local company with hundreds of hives. 

“We wanted to link up with local beekeepers because we didn’t have bees here yet and we wanted to use local honey for the slush,” Moran said. “And they were awesome. They welcomed us into their shop and showed us everything and how they do it and told us all about their different hives.” 

After catering a honeybee-themed birthday party for Marina Tolentino of Tolentino Farms, Slowey joined the small, family-owned beekeeping business as a consultant and volunteer to help grow it, basically trading his skills and labor for honey. Tolentino Honey Co. grew from 50 to 150 hives, earning recognition all over the island as a high-quality, artisan honey producer. 

“They needed the help,” Moran said. “We needed the honey.” 

Moran sells jars of Tolentino honey at the slush stand as she teaches customers about the importance of bees for pollination yet the challenge of keeping bees in Hawaiʻi. 

“They are not originally from here, so it takes a little bit of work in maintaining them pestwise, and you want to make sure they are not in too wet of an area,” she said. “… It’s not a normal thing to have honeybees out here. They actually need our help, and that’s what we are here to do.”

Honey is a healthier and more sustainable source of sugar compared with crops such as agave and sugarcane, which can deplete the soil and require significant water, Moran explains to customers. Because of this, they promote organic, small-scale beekeeping that helps Oʻahu thrive.

“You can put a beehive in the corner of a property,” Moran said, “and it’s going to pollinate whatever you’re growing, and you’re gonna get to produce this amazing honey that’s full of enzymes and pollen from all these different flowers.” 

Building a strong community has become another priority that powers their ventures. 

“Everybody likes to feel like they are part of a small town where, like, you go in somewhere and everybody knows your name and knows your order,” Moran said. “Like, I love that. I’d want that.” 

From the brand’s yellow hue to the staff’s bright dispositions, Wicked Hi is synonymous with sunshine. Moran adores regulars as if they were family. Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate regulars from newcomers with the friendly, familiar banter that flows effortlessly between Moran and guests. 

“It’s the community that really has been the biggest picture for me,” Moran said. “I just want to connect with people.”

Because of the strong company culture that Moran and Slowey have established, their staff is equally as inviting. The stands and café draw crowds comprising tourists and locals. Even world-class surfer Kelly Slater has visited the café three times since it opened this month.

“It’s been super fun,” Moran said. “We’re blasting Grateful Dead the entire time. We’re having a really good time.”

But what they do take seriously is quality. 

Moran’s keen eye for detail shows in the brand’s design, recipes and ingredients.

“We don’t use any shortcuts,” Moran said. “Everything is made from scratch, and my staff knows that and represents it as much as I do.”  

For the slushies, the fruit is locally grown, the coconut cream in the company’s famous coffee slush is made from frozen coconut without sweeteners or thickeners, and the honey is raw and locally harvested. The sourdough pizza, which will arrive at Wicked Hi Cafe on Dec. 1, is naturally fermented. 

The café also serves coffee drinks, breakfast sandwiches and pastries. A local kombucha producer, SKY Kombucha, produces Honey Jun, a probiotic-rich, fermented drink made with green tea, mint and local honey, exclusively for the café. 

Slowey’s twin sister, Brittney Slowey, came to consult in the café for the first month with her wealth of restaurant experience. Her greatest contribution is probably the sourdough Liège brioche waffle. 

The buttery dough is fermented for 12-16 hours and then stuffed with pearl sugar that caramelizes when baked to create sweet, crunchy bites. You can enjoy the waffles piled high with fresh, local fruit, such as bananas and papaya, and whipped cream in one of the café’s 25 seats, or you can take them to-go in parchment paper with a drizzle of honey alongside your morning coffee. The waffles usually sell out by 2 p.m.

The business even brought local coffee expert and consultant Shawn Steiman in to present a workshop for Moran and her staff on the art of coffee brewing. The café uses a pour-over method and a fresh-roasted Kona coffee blend from Honolulu Coffee. Alternative milks, such as oat and macadamia nut, are available for lattes. 

“I want to offer stuff that I would want to drink, and I want my staff to be equally as proud of what we’re doing,” Moran said. 

For Moran, persistence is everything as an entrepreneur. 

“It gets hard for sure,” she said, “but if you can just stay persistent in your goals and morals, like, whatever you are sticking to, don’t give those up, don’t compromise yourself, because that’s what’s going to set you apart. It gets hard, and it might not be always what’s most cost-effective, but, if you’re doing it right and you’re passionate about what you are doing, I think that the universe is on your side. That’s what I’ve learned anyways.”

Slowey is the driving force behind all of the couple’s new business ventures, Moran said. She recently gave him a greeting card that read: “Don’t let me ever hold you back from your crazy ideas. Wicked Hi Slush is your best one yet.” 

“We make it work between the both of us,” she said. “He’s got that, like, fearlessness to just go ahead full force into something, and I’ve got the dedication to do it right, I think, and, like, take all the little steps that we make a good team and we push each other in different ways.”

All the while, honey remains the couple’s passion project. Slowey still visits Tolentino Farms at least a couple of times a year to help harvest honey. He also helps families to manage hives on the North Shore and maintains 10 hives of his own. 

“I don’t know where this is gonna take us,” Moran said. “But it’s already a dream, so …”

Wicked Hi Cafe Open 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Friday, 8 a.m -7 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, 66-935 Kaukonahua Rd., Waialua, Hawaiʻi, 96791, wickedhislushie.com