How I ended up being a partner in an ice cream company

If you told me a few years ago that I would be part owner of an ice cream company, I would have thought you were crazy. “I am a software guy, not an ice cream guy,” I would have said. But, as you are about to read, things change. 

In the winter of 2015, my wife Getty and I attended some meetings of the South Osborne Syrian Refugee Initiative (SOSRI) in Winnipeg, Canada. The group had been formed to bring the South Osborne community together to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Syria. They wanted to sponsor refugees from Syria and have them settle in our neighbourhood, a small corner of the world in Winnipeg. The group was planning on sponsoring the family of Zainab Ali. Her family was scattered across Lebanon and Turkey, barely surviving the dangerous conditions there. Zainab was in Winnipeg because her husband Joseph Chaeban, a dairy scientist, was a manager at a local cheese plant. Zainab and Joseph were fairly new to Winnipeg. 

The first meeting we attended was standing room only. Our friends and neighbours listened intently as Joseph spoke. His family’s story was beyond heartbreaking. The gratitude he showed to a group of people he barely knew moved and inspired everyone. It must have been strange and even overwhelming to have been struggling for so long to keep your family alive and together across several continents, and then, out of nowhere, seventy-five Canadians in a place called Winnipeg are offering their love and support to you. 

From the start there was a special bond between Joseph and me. It wasn’t just our wacky sense of humour—I was impressed with him. He was a force of nature working all day in a cheese plant, helping Zainab run their household, attending countless SOSRI meetings translating between Arabic and English, and telling their story over and over, night after night. Zainab was Joseph’s match, attending many of the same meetings, networking her way through Winnipeg, while still finding time to be a mom to their three young and highly energetic kids. Somehow, they always seemed so put together.

As I got to know Joseph, I soon learned of his entrepreneurial spirit. I invited him to Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce and Entrepreneurs’ Organization events and he jumped at these opportunities eagerly, despite his intense schedule. I saw how energized he was about anything to do with business. I learned that Joseph grew up in a family that owned a cheese business and a trucking business. We became fast friends and our families shared dinner at each other’s houses.

Meantime, things were moving and shaking with SOSRI. Another family—Zainab’s sister Saada and her three older children—was added to the sponsored group when their situation in Lebanon worsened. The church and the SOSRI committee took it in stride, and amped up the paperwork and fundraising efforts. Our community was now sponsoring thirteen people between three families.

My two companies, the Inclusion System and IBEX Payroll, chipped in by building a website for SOSRI and working to create a fundraising video.

It all started to pay off in October 2016 when Tarek, the first of the thirteen family members, finally arrived. The last of the family members, Saada and Barakat, reached our community in February 2017.

Meanwhile, another story was brewing (or should I say “churning”?) that would end up involving our new friends, Joseph and Zainab. In December 2016, I was walking to work past a new building going up where Banana Boat, a beloved seasonal soft-serve ice cream shop, used to be. There was a “For Lease” sign up in the window. I called the leasing agent and found out that not only was the space available, but the Banana Boat name and equipment was for sale as well. I love business and I love ice cream even more. I was interested in this opportunity. 

I talked to a few potential partners and ran the numbers to put Banana Boat back in its old home. But inside this new space and with higher leasing costs my Banana Boat idea wasn’t possible. It had sunk before we ever had a chance. I walked past the “For Lease” sign every day for the next month, thinking how much I would miss the ice cream. 

Separately, Joseph had been talking to me for months about opening a Lebanese restaurant—something that could give Zainab, her sister Saada, and a few other family members full-time employment. I went along with Joseph to scout out locations, including the Banana Boat. I also told him, many times, that I was skeptical about his plan to continue working full time while starting a new restaurant. 

One day, I mentioned my near miss with the ice cream business to Joseph, he said: “You realize I am a dairy scientist, right? I could make ice cream, you know!” This seemed like a much better idea than the restaurant to both of us, but we were not sure what the business model would look like. How could we make a real year-round business out of this?

I asked around and a colleague in Calgary told me about Village Ice Cream, a shop near her that had artisanal, handcrafted flavours of hard ice cream. It was open year-round and thriving. We had nothing like this in Winnipeg and the concept excited me. But reality soon struck when I realized this would be too big of a distraction and would take me away from my two core businesses. Except I still couldn’t get ice cream out of my head. I guess I had a pretty serious case of brain freeze.

A few weeks later, while in Calgary, I reached out to the owner of Village Ice Cream and got the grand tour and a basic understanding of the business and its challenges. 

When I arrived back in South Osborne, I shared my findings with Joseph and suggested he set up something similar in Winnipeg. He was excited by the possibilities and so I offered to be an advisor and help with the financing. Joseph thought we should be partners, but I declined. This was a two-person operation—he and his wife—and three would be a crowd. I was, however, excited at the opportunity to be on the inside of a brand-new business that Winnipeg had never seen before. 

After debating for weeks about how to start the business—Joseph and I at times quarrelling like an old married couple—we decided to finance with small business loans, a loan from me, and Joseph and Zainab’s life savings. 

Soon, Joseph and I began immersing in the local food scene trying to get the business concept just right. When we started to discuss the core values of Zainab and Joseph’s business, I found that we all shared the same mindset. We wanted to turn a profit, while being nice to others, being good to the planet, keeping it about family, and making a difference in the world.

Joseph eventually decided that he would make the ice cream from scratch, literally. We would use raw local milk and pasteurize and homogenize it ourselves. We would also make as many of the ingredients as possible from scratch and use local ingredients. “Support local” was a value we all shared. All this made us more unique than any other homemade ice cream place we looked at.

Joseph began thinking of this as a full-time business—an operation that would put his background in dairy to use. He always insisted that he and Zainab shared the business, but I was not sure of Zainab’s role. I knew she would be there each day, but I did not know if she would be part of the decision-making and day-to-day leadership. I was concerned to say the least but, in a few months, Zainab would put my fears to rest. 

Things started happening fast in March of 2017. We still had not named the company, but we got incorporated, signed a lease for two units and the small business loans were approved. Our architect got to work on our plans and Joseph started ordering all the equipment we would need.

Construction took forever and cost way more than we expected. Cabinet installation and floor polishing set us back for weeks. Our purchase of a second-hand freezer with the wrong type of refrigeration equipment was another expensive lesson for us. Before even opening we were more than $100,000 over budget. With nowhere else for the money to come in my “little loan” had grown to a worrisome size. If this ice cream business failed, my family would take a major hit. We had to open the store soon. We had to start bringing in money.

It was a hectic time to say the least. Zainab was busy with the kids and all her recently arrived family members, most of whom didn’t speak English. Joseph was running the cheese plant by day, helping the refugee families by night, and trying to order and track the new equipment for the store. I was trying to not get drawn in too deep, but that didn’t last long. To top it all off, both Joseph and I are not great detail people. We’re big idea guys and the minutiae of the business was floundering fast. We needed help, and just like many others did for different things, our friend Chris stepped up and volunteered his time helping us with the details. 

As plans started coming together for what was now a miniature dairy plant and ice cream store, we found a solution to one of our biggest problems. We had been struggling with what to name the store. We landed on Chaeban Ice Cream, in honour of Joseph’s family’s long tradition in the dairy world. Joseph and I had been thinking the same thing (let’s use the Chaeban name) and each expected the other to be against it. One of us tentatively said it and we realized we were both thinking the same thing. Issues solved!.  

Our intended July opening was delayed by many months (city permits, equipment suppliers, and contractors…oh my!) which gave us time to nail down our flavours and our recipes.

Not too quietly, I had been harbouring a fear that the ice cream flavours would be the biggest weakness of the whole operation. I knew that Joseph was an expert in dairy. He could blend the right amount of milk, cream, and egg yolk, create a creamy super premium base, and safely pasteurize it. But I worried about the flavour components and what would make them unique. This worry kept me up at night, literally, wondering if my loan was at risk. Joseph did not help much. He would constantly say: “Don’t worry, Darryl. Ice cream is much easier than cheese.”

This is where Zainab saved the day. She had been making small batches of ice cream at home in their apartment ever since the project had begun—so small that I had never got to taste them because Joseph and the kids always ate them! Zainab insisted on making all the ingredients from scratch as much as possible and using no added flavour or colour. This meant making caramel from scratch for our salted caramel recipe, baking pounds of strawberries in order to dehydrate them and increase their flavour intensity for our strawberry recipe, and picking mint leaves by hand off mint stalks for our mint chocolate chip. These later became some of our signature flavours: Salty Carl, Prairie Barry, and Mojito Mint Patti. 

The first time I got invited to taste the ice cream, Joseph “accidentally” handed me a cup of some stuff that had been part of an early experiment. It tasted off and I tried to remain calm as I looked at the $35,000 machine sitting in front of us. He was teasing me by handing me a failed experiment and pretending it was the best they had come up with. He allayed my fears by presenting the real (and real delicious!) stuff a few minutes later. 

There is one flavour that deserves special mention: Abir Al Sham. When Zainab and Joseph explained this recipe, basically a modernized version of a traditional Syrian recipe, I was confused. It sounded overly complicated. Rose water, orange blossom water, toasted pistachios and cashews, ricotta cheese, and orchid root powder for texture. When I first tasted it, I was unsure about it. It was perfumey and chewier than ice cream I was used to—not sure something our Canadian customers would be on board with. A low seller. But once again I was proven wrong. It has been one of our best sellers from the beginning and is now one of my favourites. 

In August, we started seeing things come together in the store, but it was obvious by then that we would not be open for months. We would miss selling ice cream during the prime summer months. Another setback. The only silver lining was that we had a little more time to figure out how to market our ice cream and our store. 

After attending a talk by Warren Bergen, venture capitalist and author of Swagger & Sweat: A Start-up Capital Boot Camp, and paying attention to other businesses in our niche, we decided to invest more in marketing and do it sooner than most new businesses would. We saw that social media and Instagram would be a major focus and a great way to tell our story. We hired a full-time marketing person. Some thought it crazy to spend even more when we were already way over budget—but we thought it would be crazier to build this thing and to have no one know about it. 

We had another little issue that was weighing on each of us and one of our core values. Being good to Mother Earth. Selling pints for takeaway was part of our plan from early on, but we didn’t want to create more plastic in the world. So, we copied (with permission) an ice cream shop in Vancouver and planned to sell pints in returnable glass with a $1 deposit. One problem solved, a thousand more to go! 

As summer turned into fall, most of the equipment started being installed in the shop. Thanks to the delays, we had even more time to work on the ice cream and Zainab was able to figure out how to do creative things with the recipes that no one else was doing (I’ve been forbidden to give away family secrets!). And needless to say, I started gaining weight! 

With all the blending pasteurizing (heating) and homogenizing equipment now in place, we realized an opportunity to do something even more special—vegan ice cream, which I soon found out is incredibly difficult to make well. Lots of blending and mixing. Being the genius the she is, not to mention a tireless worker, Zainab was able to create something she called Glen Coconut—vegan chocolate and coconut. Vegans and lactose intolerant of the world (or at least in Winnipeg) unite! 

As the winter of 2017 approached, everything was in place but there was still the matter of testing and inspection by provincial authorities. 

Manitoba Agriculture staff spent days in our mini-plant with Joseph and Zainab, auditing our procedures and checking out all our equipment. It was frustrating, maddening, and nerve-wracking. We waited anxiously for weeks, like a high school kid waiting every day by the phone for their crush to call (okay, maybe that doesn’t happen anymore: #dadalert). But soon—which was a stroke of good luck—we were given notice that our ice cream was 100% safe. We could now officially sell our ice cream to the public!

On December 21, 2017, the first day of winter, we opened the store. The SOSRI families were there, along with over a hundred people who helped us along the way. It was a giant love-fest! Who would have thought that from those initial meetings at the church, we would have thirteen new Canadians, family who became our family, AND this unique new addition to South Osborne and to Winnipeg?

After all the buzz died down, things were slow but steady. You didn’t think the story ended there did you? We didn’t know if we were going to stay open! In March of 2018 we were pleasantly surprised when the store almost broke even. It was paying salaries to Joseph, Zainab, Saada, and our marketing person, and still almost made a profit before summer even arrived. But things flattened out in April. Scary for us because we thought the warm months would bring in more business. By now the debt we had piled up started to look more like a mountain than a mole hill. Would Chaeban Ice Cream last? Or was this a fun little project that got four people excited for a year only to end in bankruptcy?

Our first few sunny days gave us our first real glimmer of hope. Sales one warm Saturday were more than the whole week prior. Then we got hit with another setback.

When the first heat wave came, the store’s air conditioning failed, and we couldn’t figure it out. In the front of the store, with the big windows, it got super-hot when the sun came out. Meanwhile in the back where we prepped the ice cream it was freezing no matter how high we turned up the heat. Customers in the front were cooking while Zainab and Saada were freezing in the back. Customers were writing reviews about how great the ice cream was, but how the store was too hot. “Don’t go there on a hot day,” they said. Not the kind of word-of-mouth an ice cream shop needs. Our engineers and contractors argued and pointed fingers at each other and told us we needed to spend thousands on bigger and better equipment—thousands we did not have.

One day Joseph and I were talking about how it was like opposite day every day in the shop—cold in the back, hot in the front. One of us blurted out, “it almost seems like the thermostats are hooked up backwards.” We looked at each other and laughed. But we had to try something, anything. Counter-intuitively, we turned down the thermostat in the back, and turned up the thermostat in the front. There was no way that this would work, but we were desperate. 

Instantly our problem was solved! The next morning the wiring was fixed and we were ready to roll. Over the next few weeks the whole business started to pick up steam as well. The weather turned warm and with it came customers in droves. People loved the location and the ice cream. The positive reviews began multiplying (none about the temperature inside, I might add!). 

In May sales went through the roof and we made our first real profit. The formula was simple, make great ice cream from scratch in a friendly clean environment, and share the story far and wide. Done and done. 

The only other thing we added to the business was a mobile cart. Joseph lugged that thing all over the province to so many different events and markets. The cart helped get the word out in a big way and it was a great source of additional revenue to help reduce our debts.

We settled into a routine of making ice cream including new feature flavour(s) every few weeks and telling our story in different ways.

In June, Zainab and Joseph had their first time away from the store since the whole “let’s open up an ice cream shop” adventure started. They went to Vancouver to accept the Foodie of the Year award from Western Living Magazine. Over the spring and summer, every news outlet in Winnipeg reported on “the ice cream store born from the Syrian refugee crisis”; some of this coverage even went national. We loved the attention because it brought people into the store and the ice cream kept them coming back. We had regulars and the whole thing began to feel more and more like a family operation—a gift for and from the community. Chaeban even got featured in Air Canada’s inflight magazine and we actually had people coming from the airport on layovers to taste the ice cream, then heading back to catch their flight. Pinch me—I thought I was dreaming!

In the midst of that crazy first summer I suggested to Joseph that maybe he should slow down—as the Beatles put it, it seemed like he was working eight days a week. “I will slow down in the fall,” he said, and followed up with some old-timey Lebanese saying like: “Darryl I need to sell the fishes before they begin to stink.” I translated that into an old-timey Canadian saying like: “It was time to make hay while the sun is shining.” He was right. We could all sleep in the winter—not in the summer!

This past winter I finally agreed to become a partner in the business. It turns out that Zainab, Joseph, and I all have different skills that complement one another, and we truly enjoy each other’s company. As a sum we are better than the individual parts when it comes to the company. Just like my partner in my other businesses, Joseph and Zainab are smart, hardworking, honest, courageous, and fun to work with. They are the kind of people I love seeing every day. 

So, that’s how it happened. Now when people ask me what I do, and most inevitably start yawning when I tell them about my day job at the Inclusion System or IBEX Payroll, I switch gears quickly and tell them about Chaeban. They always perk right up and start asking questions and inquiring about free samples. My two friends and partners for life—Joseph and Zainab—probably wish I would slow down on giving away free samples…but they are just as “bad” so they can’t stop me!