NO SLOWING CANADA’S JUICE KING
Expansion plans fuel Booster Juice’s success
Sitting at the rear of a EDMONTON low profile, flat-roofed complex in southeast Edmonton is the headquarters of a rarely recognized Canadian business success story.
The drab exterior of AW Holdings Corp. — a name unrecognizable to most — is the antithesis of the outrageous hues that identify its stores from coast to coast.
It’s almost inconceivable that you haven’t heard of Booster Juice, Canada’s biggest smoothie seller that many Canadians, heck, many Albertans, probably don’t realize was born in Wild Rose Country.
And the man behind the sprawling network of 330 stores globally is extremely proud of his roots.
Dale Wishewan sits in his classic plaid suit, spinning a pen in his hand as he thinks in silence.
Sports memorabilia lines the wall of his office — a signed hockey stick and a few baseballs in plastic cases sit behind him in a bookcase.
If you didn’t know him you’d probably think he was nervous. But for those who do, they know that’s rarely the case for the 48-year-old.
“I don’t get nervous much,” he finally says. “But I think that comes from my background as a mechanical engineer. I like to be methodical. I try to be very analytical.
“People see me as a risk taker, and I do take risks, but I like to think of them as being educated risks.”
He’s also a big believer in intuition and backing yourself. After all, he didn’t have a background in food services before launching what is now Canada’s largest juice bar franchise.
“I tell this to people all the time. If you’ve been successful in school or in a career, then there is a good chance you will be successful on your own in your own business.”
That’s easy to say when you are Canada’s Juice King.
Waskatenau, the self-proclaimed baseball capital of Alberta, with a current population of 260, sits 90 kilometres northeast of Edmonton and hasn’t changed much since Wishewan was a child.
Between Grade 1 and Grade 9, there were only 12 students in his class. And when he finished high school at HA Kostash School in the neighbouring town of Smoky Lake, his graduation class was just 44.
Wishewan, the youngest of three boys, was rebellious and a “handful” for his grandparents, Frances and Andrew, who raised the siblings after their parents divorced when he was just five.
He didn’t fall into hockey like most kids in small town Canada — striking, considering Wishewan is now part-owner of the NHL’s newest franchise, the Vegas Golden Knights — so he channelled his adolescent energy into baseball.
“For some reason we had a great baseball program,” he says.
Not only was he pushed by his coaches to excel, but he also found a driving force in his grandmother.
“Our grandparents were tough on us, but in a good way,” he says.
“My grandmother had about one-and-a-half years of formal education, but she was as smart as could be and she, in her own way, always made me feel I could do better.
“I remember coming home from a baseball game and we hadn’t won and the question was, ‘You didn’t win?’ It wasn’t, ‘Did you have fun?’
“If I ended up getting 90 per cent on a test, it was, ‘You couldn’t have got a 100?’ ”
A spot on Team Alberta led to a baseball scholarship and in 1987, at age 17, Wishewan went to the University of Alberta, before transferring to Portland State University in Oregon a year later to play baseball and get a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering.
“I remember walking into an auditorium of about 300 people and thought to myself, there are more people in this room than in my entire hometown,” he says. “It was quite a change.”
After graduating in 1992, he returned to Alberta and began working in international technical sales at Edmonton Exchanger, a local manufacturing and machine shop.
It’s there he met Edmonton Exchanger CEO Henry Gusse, who, over the next few years, would become a business mentor and stock market ally, jumping on the Bre-X Minerals bandwagon in the mid1990s. Wishewan bought into the Calgary-based gold mining company at $13 a share. He cashed out when the share price hit $92, missing the stock’s peak at over $280 before it tanked in the largest mining scandal of all time in 1997.
The rumour is Wishewan had never heard of a juice bar before a friend he met in Oregon, Jon Amack, asked him in 1999 about the size of the burgeoning health food industry in Canada.
The United States was experiencing an explosion of interest in juice bars sparked by the expansion of California-based Jamba Juice and its corporate merger with competitor Zuka Juice out of Utah.
Almost a decade earlier, a California fitness fanatic and Safeway manager named Kirk Perron opened his first juice bar in the town of San Luis Obispo, midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
By early 1999, Perron had 125 outlets. Two years later that number more than doubled.
Armed with $350,000 in seed money, Wishewan and Amack saw an opportunity. Just four months after that initial question, on Nov. 13, 1999, they opened their first Booster Juice in Sherwood Park, just outside Edmonton. In that short time frame, they created everything from a menu of smoothie recipes to clever names to operation manuals to the design and decor of stores because franchising was the goal.
“I recognized very soon that I couldn’t be the person who had to cash out at the end of the night as a cash business,” he says.
“And to scale the business, you have to empower and trust people, otherwise there is no way of ever growing. Everything was geared up knowing that this was going to be more than organic growth.
“I always had people asking, ‘Is this a fad?’ and my answer was always, ‘No way’.”
Wishewan said people always questioned whether it was just a fad, but he says his confidence came from seeing the world changing around him. People were becoming more health conscious and “well-being” and “wellness” were becoming buzzwords.
Five months after their first store opened, they opened a second.
In May 2000 a third opened and a fourth quickly followed.
In 2001, a franchise cost $186,500. Today, one will set you back $274,500, which includes a $30,000 franchise fee. Franchisees pay a six per cent royalty on gross sales.
By the end of their first year, 15 Booster Juice stores had sprung up. By the end of Year Two, 50 outrageously brightly coloured stores had appeared, which Wishewan says remains a Canadian franchise record for speed of growth.
Year Three saw another 22 open — “I put the brakes on a bit because we were growing so fast” — and by the end of the fourth year there were more than 125 stores.
The company then began to gain traction in the East.
“You can’t become big nationally if you can’t make it in Eastern Canada,” he says. “Western Canada is OK, but we have more stores in Ontario than in the rest of the country combined.”
Global expansion plans were hatched. Record sales were eclipsed year-over-year.
The first U.S. store opened on Oct. 25, 2003, in Boise, Idaho, and several days later, a second store opened in Utah.
Inquiries about potential franchises flooded in. Business was booming, and as CEO and president, Wishewan bought out Amack’s share.
The United Arab Emirates became a target. Shanghai and Beijing were floated as possible new markets. So, too, was the United Kingdom.
And then came the recession of 2008. The United Arab Emirates deal didn’t turn out as envisioned. Wishewan visited China on several occasions, but decided to skip it altogether. “I’m happy we haven’t opened over there,” he says.
Of the 330 stores open today, 325 are in Canada.
The U.S. is still on Booster Juice’s radar and for good reason. A report by IBISWorld late last year said juice and smoothie bar revenue in the U.S. increased to $2.3 billion in 2016. But the Canadian interloper would face a much more saturated market south of the border with dozens of competitors still led by Perron’s Jamba Juice fighting for consumer attention.
Having consolidated its place as the No. 1 juice bar franchise in Canada with more stores than all the competition combined, Wishewan says AW Holdings Corp. is still looking to enter between two and three new international markets each year.