Hawaiʻi Excellence in Business Awards 2026 - Hawaii Business Magazine
Hawaiʻi Business Magazine bestowed corporate and nonprofit awards for outstanding performance in business success, innovation, and community impact. Companies were honored in September for excellence across Small, Medium, and Large Corporation categories, plus seven Specialty Awards spanning community impact, innovation, stewardship, and workforce development.
10 hours ago
By Jennifer Ablan & Ashley McLean
Sam Walton’s and Howard Schultz’s Legacies in Business
Sam Walton opened a five-and-dime store in rural Arkansas decades before Walmart became the world’s largest retailer. Howard Schultz worked his way up from a door-to-door salesman before rebuilding Starbucks into a global brand. Hawai‘i has its own version of that story, and it didn’t happen on the continent first.
Local Business Titans: Robert Taira and Eddie Flores Jr.
In 1950, Robert Taira borrowed $400 to open a one-display-case, three-stool bakery in Hilo; the sweet bread he perfected there now sits on grocery shelves across the country as King’s Hawaiian. A generation later, Eddie Flores Jr. and Johnson Kam took over a single Honolulu drive-in and built L&L Hawaiian Barbecue into the largest Hawai‘i-born restaurant chain in the world, with more than 230 locations from California to Japan.
The Spirit of Excellence in Business
These are not “overnight success” stories. Excellence in running a business involves habit, which includes building operations one decision at a time, treating its newest hires well, creating the best and most productive workplace culture, and responding when its community is in crisis.
L&L Hawaiian Barbecue and King’s Hawaiian: From Local to Global
Scaling a business follows those habits – and as King’s Hawaiian and L&L both show, that habit can start in a single storefront on a single Hawai‘i street and still end up on tables across the country.
That is exactly the spirit Hawaii Business Magazine set out to recognize last year with the launch of the Excellence in Business Awards.