Joseph Chaeban & Zainab Ali (Chaeban Ice Cream): built to employ a family
Thirteen people were coming. They were scattered across Lebanon and Turkey, fleeing a war, and a neighbourhood group in South Osborne had raised the money to bring them to Winnipeg. When they landed, they would need work.
Joseph Chaeban knew this because the thirteen were his wife's family. Zainab Ali's relatives were the reason the South Osborne Syrian Refugee Initiative existed. And Joseph, a dairy scientist who'd spent years consulting for cheese plants across the country, decided the thank-you he owed this neighbourhood would take the shape of a business: something that could put every arriving family member on a payroll the moment they touched Canadian soil.
Cheese in the basement
The instinct came from watching his own father rebuild from scratch. The Chaeban family left Lebanon for Germany, then moved to Canada in 1988 when Joseph was six. His father had run Fromagerie Chaeban back home, but a language barrier shut him out of the Canadian dairy industry. So the two of them made cheese together in the basement of their house, father passing technique to son the only way he could.
Years later, Joseph's father told him to go to school, get the degree, and do the thing properly. On borrowed money, Joseph enrolled at the University of Vermont to study milk chemistry and microbiology. His professors noticed immediately: he already knew things they couldn't teach. The European techniques his father had handed down in that basement gave him an edge over classmates who'd only read about cheesemaking.
After graduating, Joseph bounced between dairy consulting gigs across Canada. In 2015, he was recruited to manage a cheese plant in Winnipeg. He and Zainab moved from Ontario. Neither of them planned to stay permanently.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
The obligation that became a business
Then the sponsorship came together. The South Osborne community rallied. Zainab's thirteen family members would arrive within months. Joseph did the math: thirteen people, one neighbourhood, limited English, a new country in winter. He needed something that could absorb all of them. Food businesses have always been the first employer for newcomers to Canada, but usually one or two at a time, not thirteen.
A man named Darryl Stewart was walking to work one morning and noticed a for-lease sign on the old Banana Boat ice cream shop on Osborne Street. When Darryl mentioned the failed business to Joseph over coffee, Joseph replied: "You know I'm a dairy scientist, right?"
The three of them, Joseph, Zainab, and Darryl, started planning in March 2017. They opened Chaeban Ice Cream on the first day of winter, December 2017. Opening an ice cream shop in a Winnipeg December is either absurd or confident. For Joseph, it was simply when the build-out finished and the family needed paycheques.
From scratch means from scratch
Everything at Chaeban is made from raw milk sourced from a single family farm in Stonewall, Manitoba, the kind of single-producer relationship most operators only manage on one or two items. No artificial flavours, no artificial colours. The Middle Eastern heritage shows up in flavours like Abir Al Sham: toasted pistachios and cashews, orchid root powder, rose and orange blossom water. Joseph's dairy science training means he controls the process at a level most ice cream makers never reach. He is not a chef who learned to make ice cream. He is a scientist who understands fat crystallization, emulsification, and fermentation at molecular level, and happens to use that knowledge to make something a six-year-old would love.
The quality showed. In 2022, Chaeban entered four categories at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair and placed in all four. Salty Carl took Grand Champion, best ice cream in Canada. Rocky Road won first in chocolate with inclusions. A Winnipeg shop nobody outside Manitoba had heard of beat every established dairy in the country.
1,600 subscriptions in a pandemic
Running an ice cream business in a prairie winter means watching revenue drop by a factor of ten between August and January. Joseph had always understood this seasonal math. But COVID made the summer disappear too.
In 2020, with the shop forced to close, Darryl suggested a subscription model. Joseph figured they needed 150 subscribers to survive. Within two hours of launching, they had 100. Within two days, 400. The final count landed at over 1,600 households paying monthly for ice cream delivery, a customer list the business owned outright rather than rented from a platform.
That number told Joseph something: the community wasn't buying ice cream. They were keeping a neighbour alive. The same instinct that drove SOSRI to sponsor thirteen strangers was now expressed as a standing order for salted caramel.
The subscription success did more than save the pandemic year. It proved demand existed for a second business. Joseph launched Chaeban Artisan, a cheese company built on the same principles: single-source milk, handmade, nothing artificial. His feta placed third and fourth at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in 2024. The basement knowledge finally had a commercial home.
The pattern other operators can steal
Joseph's story gets told as an immigration success or a feel-good refugee narrative. Those frames aren't wrong, but they miss the business logic underneath.
He didn't build a purpose-driven brand and then find a purpose. He had an obligation first, a concrete one with a headcount and a deadline, and the obligation forced every business decision into a specific shape. The shop had to be labour-intensive (thirteen jobs, not three). It had to be in South Osborne (where the community was). It had to open immediately (people were arriving). Constraints that would paralyze most founders became his architecture.
The community champion initiative he runs now, naming seasonal flavours after local heroes and donating a portion to their chosen charity, isn't marketing bolted on after the fact. It's the same logic that started the business: a neighbourhood did something for you, so you build something that feeds back into the neighbourhood. The loop is structural, not performative.
Seven years in, the family is employed, the cheese company is expanding toward Eastern Canada, the ice cream has national awards, and the neighbourhood still shows up. Not because the branding is clever, but because the origin was real.
Sources: Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, WTC Winnipeg, CBC Manitoba, CBC Manitoba, Global News Winnipeg, The Winnipeg Foundation, Chaeban Artisan.
