Cold Juice; Shawarm Heart
Obby Khan knew he had a strong personal brand after a long career in the Canadian Football league. “I was well-known. Eight and a half out of 10 people liked me,” he joked. “I have a recognizable face.” His face became the face of Shawarma Khan, the restaurant that launched his post-football career and his journey into entrepreneurship.
Photos by Claudine Gervais
Instead of looking to work for someone else, Khan was determined to be his own boss. As an offensive lineman, he was used to blocking the defense of the opposing team. Now he had to make a path for himself in business. He just needed to find the right one.
“I thought about real estate, or retail. But I love food.”
He saw an opportunity to share his Middle Eastern culture through food and provide Winnipeggers with options he sought for himself: healthy and local fast-casual shawarma, a seasoned and marinated meat that is slow roasted on a rotating vertical spit – and later, fresh cold-pressed juice.
“Consumers have been duped,” he says of an industry that markets healthy food that is anything but, and is instead frozen, processed or mass-produced.
Food was a fraught subject for Khan during struggles with his own health. He was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 2008, an inflammatory bowel disease causing inflammation and ulcers in the digestive tract. After surgery to remove his large intestine, he started looking to the foods that would help with his recovery, and afterward maintain his newfound health. “I figured if I was doing it, others may be as well.”
He recruited his best friend, Joel Assly, a Lebanese Red Seal chef, to arrive at the recipes for use in the first Shawarma Khan location, opened in the Exchange District six and a half years ago. It was a rollercoaster of a time, between retiring from the CFL, launching the restaurant and welcoming the birth of his son.
He hasn’t slowed down since, opening additional locations on Pembina and Graham, as well as the home of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at Investors Group Field. Green Carrot Juice Company has locations in Osborne Village, Tuxedo and the Winnipeg airport. The juice is also available at a number of retail locations.
He keeps an eye to his health and says he is in better shape now than he was as a professional athlete, losing 50 pounds, going from a 46- to 35-inch waist and from 310 pounds to 260.
While he called in a chef to help with the shawarma offerings, the juice is all his invention. “I was like a mad scientist,” he says of lining up rows of ingredients from apples to kale and spinach to pineapple. Trial and error ultimately ended in success with the formulation of 12 juice and six smoothie combinations. His favourite? The Hardcore – a blend of apple, celery, cucumber, parsley, spinach, kale, ginger, lemon, Lime, MCT oil and aloe vera.
Khan said he plans to go hardcore for a few more years, as he points to a phrase tacked on his office bulletin board: Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.
“I love what I do, but my vision is to be able to take my foot off the throttle and enjoy the fruits of my hard labour.”
You can bet that fruit will be juiced.
