A family-run Waipahu snack maker is still hand-producing crack seed after six decades, good news for local nostalgia but a trade with an uncertain future.

• Jade Foods makes over 50 kinds of crack seed, from rock salt to li hing mango and pickled mango, in its Waipahu warehouse.
• Hollis Ho started the company in 1961 after a failed attempt at selling pizza, which locals thought was overpriced bread and cheese.
• He learned the craft on a trip to Taiwan, then brought cooks to Hawaii and tuned the flavors away from a medicinal taste toward something milder for local palates.
• The work is slow and manual — some batches marinate for two to three weeks — and his daughter Diane, now president, learned every job from payroll to the forklift.
• Fewer people are left who know how to make it, and the family already gave up its California farm because the labor was too much.

Outlook: The business is passing to a third generation, but crack seed is leaning on an aging base of makers and may get much harder to find in a couple of decades.