Adela’s Country Eatery—a small takeout counter in Oahu, Hawaii, which won the #5 spot on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat—is known for its colorful noodle dishes made from local produce. But according to the founders, Adela’s wasn’t initially conceived as a restaurant, or even as a business. It was founded as an experiment in sustainability.
Before ever creating a business plan, co-owners Millie Chan and Adela Vistacion asked themselves: How can we reduce waste and repurpose vegetables with a short shelf-life into a product people will actually use? Their answer: noodles. As a staple ingredient in the Hawaiian diet, noodles were not only the perfect vessel for excess produce—they had widespread customer demand too.
Millie and her daughter Elizabeth opened the restaurant as a way to showcase their new product—and soon, the operation took on a life of its own. Using locally grown Hawaiian produce that would otherwise be thrown away, such as purple-hued Okinawan sweet potatoes from nearby farms, they create noodle dishes for tourists and locals alike.
Thanks to its unconventional start, the restaurant has garnered support for both its customer service as well as its sustainable mission. According to Elizabeth, Adela’s director of business development, the two go hand in hand: The most successful sustainable initiatives are developed by the community, for the community.
“We always say that our customers are like our family,” Elizabeth said. “And when you have that type of relationship with the people around you, that’s a core part of developing sustainability initiatives.”
Small businesses play an important role in rallying their communities to make sustainable choices for the environment. Follow Adela’s roadmap for taking a sustainability intervention from an idea to a collective solution—and eventually, a thriving small business with an ecosystem of its own.
1. Offer a community-specific solution
Before founding Adela’s, Millie and Elizabeth were assisting Richard Chan—Adela’s agriculture and community outreach director—with a food security project on the island of Hawai’i, helping organic pig farmers learn to smoke meat and mix sausage.
It was on one of those visits that they witnessed farmers dumping a truckload of Okinawan sweet potato in the ground. “It was just incredible,” said Richard, who now sources produce for the restaurant. He remembers thinking: “How can you do that? It’s a crime.”
In Hawaii, shipping delays and transportation restrictions mean most farmers have just a two- to three-day window to sell their crops. Once a commodity passes its shelf life, they can’t ship or sell it—so it ends up as waste or pig food.
“[Okinawan sweet potatoes] were being fed to pigs because the farmer couldn’t get it to the market in Honolulu, so we were like, ‘Wait a second! We could use this for something else,’” Elizabeth said. “It’s a staple that everybody likes and nobody [was] doing this yet.”
When introducing something new, it’s important to consider your community’s needs, culture, and habits. The team experimented with turning Okinawan sweet potatoes into a variety of shelf-stable products so farmers could extend the life of their crops and Hawaiians could enjoy a staple product without having to import it.
According to Elizabeth, noodles were the natural solution. They wanted to create a product that their community would actually use and enjoy, and in Hawaii, noodles are a backbone of the local diet. “We were motivated by the agricultural products around us, and the method we chose to share that with people was through noodles,” she said.
2. Generate interest for your initiative
Soon, Millie and Elizabeth realized their experiment had a bigger purpose than they ever imagined. They decided to share their noodles with the island of Oahu by opening Adela’s Country Eatery, a small, no-frills takeout spot that paired their signature noodles with create-your-own sauces and toppings like lechon and garlic shrimp—plus desserts like their famous ube cheesecake.
How did they know it was time to take the leap to a brick-and-mortar location? As the team quickly realized, a sustainable solution requires buy-in from the community. Opening a restaurant was a way to both raise their product’s profile and lower the intimidation factor for first-time customers.
“The thing about dry noodles is that you need a forum to showcase them,” Elizabeth said. “Otherwise, it’s hard for people to conceptualize: ‘Wow, your noodles are purple and they have sweet potatoes in them. Is that actually good?’ So [the restaurant is] kind of like the Costco sample counter. If you try it first, you might like it, and if you like it, you might buy it.”
When they opened Adela’s in 2019, customers weren’t necessarily coming because they cared about the business’s mission. They were coming because Adela’s noodles were good—so good that Yelp reviewers like Lucy Y. say they “often dream of” them.
According to Elizabeth, this is how you begin to make customers care. “If you’re starting a business out of pocket, sooner or later, you have to generate some interest in the product,” she said. “If we see sweet potatoes being wasted, we make a product, nobody wants to buy it and that still doesn’t bring enough attention to the issues.”
3. Make your community a part of the solution
When the pandemic hit, Richard could no longer travel back and forth from Oahu to the big island of Hawaiʻi to source Okinawan sweet potatoes for the restaurant. But Millie and Elizabeth didn’t see this as a setback. Instead, they were transparent about their dilemma with the community, and together, they came up with a hyperlocal solution: produce sourced from their own backyards.
In Oahu, many locals have easy access to bountiful produce on their own property, including ulu or breadfruit trees. According to Richard, just two or three breadfruit trees can yield up to 800 pounds of the starchy fruit, which tastes and cooks similarly to a potato.
“[Ulu] has a really small carbon footprint,” Richard said. “But the big problem with ulu is they only last about two to three days once you pick it. So we started to talk to a lot of the locals around us, and we really got a lot of support from them. [As of today,] we pick up most of the ulu from the area where we’re located.”
Given its starchy nature, ulu is perfect for noodle-making. Millie and Adela steam the vegetables and mash it into flour to make fresh dough, using a Japanese machine to extrude the noodles daily. Richard also gathers cuttings from neighbors’ moringa (or malunggay) trees, a leafy green vegetable that gives the noodles a vibrant hue.
By sourcing produce directly from the neighborhood, Millie’s team cuts down on travel time and fossil fuels associated with shipping. Their hyper-local strategy has also had unexpected benefits: Once Adela’s started collaborating with farmers and locals around them, they noticed their mission received even more support from the community.
Elizabeth said: “We have neighbors coming in and saying, ‘You can use more ulu. I have a tree in my backyard. Let me just bring some in.’ And so we’d buy it from our customers. That’s how we got more interest [in the restaurant.] Somewhere out there, I’m sure somebody was saying: ‘My breadfruit is being used in this plate of noodles over here. Wanna go try it for lunch?’”
4. Build relationships to support your initiative’s future
Sourcing food isn’t the only way Adela’s encourages transparency and collaborates with the community. They do their best to bring people inside the food production process—allowing customers to watch the noodle making process while waiting for their food. By giving customers a first-hand look into the cooking process, Elizabeth hopes to make the customer experience memorable, even without table service.
“We thought that for the person making the noodles, it would actually be fun for them to have a chance to actually meet the people they’re making the noodles for and chat with the customers,” she said. “For our customers, we thought we’d bring the experience a little bit closer to them because we do actually find the noodle process to be almost magical when it comes out.”
Another way Adela’s brings customers into the conversation is by communicating their values on platforms like Yelp. Yelp reviewer Gina L. said she bought into the restaurant’s mission when she saw a Business Highlight on its Yelp Page that read “locally sourced ingredients.” Meeting Millie—and seeing her deliver on this promise up close—left a lasting impression.
“Millie showed us a banner on the side of the wall that had all the information about their locally sourced ingredients,” Gina said. “Since it’s on an island, I feel like that’s really important for the economy. They’re able to not only support farmers but also their neighbors and their friends through their products.”
Word of mouth powers much of Adela’s success—and the more customers rave about it, the more locals want to collaborate with the restaurant. These relationships help the restaurant ensure a more sustainable future for the island of Oahu.
“The key thing is if you communicate to the customer, they really support you,” Richard said. “I really appreciate all the locals and the tourists—they really support us, and they give us the opportunity to serve them. And if they like it, they always tell their friends.”
Photos from Adela’s Country Eatery on Yelp
These lessons come from an episode of Behind the Review, Yelp & Entrepreneur Media’s weekly podcast. Listen below to hear from Millie, Elizabeth, and Gina, or visit the episode page to read more, subscribe to the show, and explore other episodes.
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