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Forrest Ching (center) with his Disney+ co-workers.
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Forrest at the drink manufacturer site with a fresh Hapa can off the line.
With a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from HPU, you can accomplish any number of exciting goals, both during and after graduation. You might work at The Walt Disney Company, helping lead engineering teams that power Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. Or you might launch a new beverage company, introducing pineapple black tea and other unique flavors to New York City. If you are like HPU alumnus Forrest Ching, why not do both? Since graduating with his MBA in 2022, Ching has hit the ground running, working at Disney and co-founding Hapa Drink Company in 2025.
Ching’s journey begins in Kailua, where he grew up surrounded by family, friends, and countless trips across the Pali as a child and young adult. “I’ve driven the Pali at least a thousand times,” he said with a laugh. After graduating from Kamehameha Schools in 2007, he moved to Oregon for his undergraduate degree in finance at Portland State University, then on to New York City, where he and his wife have lived since 2015.
But when COVID-19 arrived in 2020, he returned home to O‘ahu to help care for his father before he passed away. Those years, he says, were formative. “I am very glad that I was able to be back home during that time, and to help my mom move on to her next phase in life. I also really enjoyed re-connecting with my braddahs and I have my wife to thank for supporting our move home.” Out of that period of transition came another big decision: pursuing an MBA at HPU.
Left to right: Lucy, Annie, and Forrest at the New York City warehouse, ready to sell.
“The Executive MBA at HPU was an excellent refresher for all the core competencies in business administration that I’d learned 10 years earlier,” Ching said. “Business is all about learning how to quickly come together with people from all walks of life to execute on a project. The MBA program gave us many repetitions in that.”
Ching highlighted the program’s accessibility and location. “The convenience of the MBA was key for me,” he shared. “While it was during COVID and we were mostly remote, it was also just a quick drive from Kawaiaha‘o Plaza, so I did feel a strong bond with my school, then and now. If you are looking for a welcoming community in the heart of downtown, look no further than HPU.”
HPU’s business curriculum and expert faculty prepared Ching for the fast-moving world of media and tech. Now at Disney, he leads engineering teams that build internal tools for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN.
“My favorite framework I love to reference from my MBA is forming, storming, norming, performing,” he shared. “In media and tech, teams are constantly forming and dissolving, so keeping a pulse on their maturity and communicating that to leaders is key.”
Outside of his corporate day job, the strong entrepreneurial mindset Ching gained at HPU helped him dream up and launch Hapa Drink Company, a new beverage brand. “Our mission at Hapa is to share the Aloha spirit with the world, one drink at a time. Our vision is a world where authentic Hawaiian flavors become mainstream,” Ching said.
Their debut drink, Pineapple Black Tea, is a refreshing nod to Hawai‘i’s plantation iced tea, made with black tea, pineapple juice, and cane sugar. But for Ching and his co-founders Lucy Dolly Caires and Annie Truong, Hapa’s identity is about more than tea. “Lucy and I were working to become craft tea brewers, on a mission to bring plantation iced tea to NYC. But, when Annie joined us and led us through brand strategy exercises, we came to realize that we are not a tea company – we are a Hawai‘i company.”
Based in Brooklyn, Hapa Drink Company is first focusing on New York City’s vibrant café and restaurant scene, already earning repeat orders from local partners. “One of my drivers for getting into small business is to make meaningful, one-on-one connections with positive forces in the community,” Ching says. At the same time, he dreams of one day bringing Hapa home. “I would love to get picked up by local Hawai‘i small businesses. That would mean everything.”
Ching reflects on the arc of his journey often, from Kailua to New York City, from finance to Disney to entrepreneurship. He would like to remind students not to put too much pressure on one decision in life. “Think adequately about which college you want to attend, but don’t stress yourself out. While it is the biggest decision of your life at 17 or 18, remember that you will mature a lot in just a few short years. I am coming up on my high school 20-year reunion and I realize the insane amount of growth that I had both during college and in each of my seven jobs thereafter. There is a lot of life to live.”
And always remember, Ching articulated, that happiness is found not in milestones, but in presence. “Being exactly where you are, doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing — that is every day, and that is what life is about,” Ching said. “There is no such thing as everlasting difficulty and there is no such thing as everlasting success. I’ve learned to embrace both the highs and the lows and to enjoy the ride.”
To learn more about Hapa Drink Company go to www.hapadrinkco.com, and to learn more about HPU’s MBA, go to www.hpu.edu/mba.
