Persian grocer Akhavan
Offers inexpensive food that’s good for you.
Ali Ajabi is not your run-of-the mill grocer. Owner, with his three brothers, and major-domo of Persian grocer Supermarché Akhavan, Ajabi frets that some of his customers don’t eat right.
“I see young people sometime, they have little money, they come in and buy a big bag of chips and a bottle of Coke,” he says, laughing. “It’s going to kill them.”
It is an infectious laugh, and Ajabi uses it often to punctuate his speech. It would seem that life has been good to the Ajabi brothers, including Mohammad, Nasser and Hassan, all immigrants from Iran who settled here in 1983.
The brothers operate two stores, one on Sherbrooke St. W. and the other on Pierrefonds Blvd. But they have not forgotten their roots or the importance of thrift.
“Many of our people are poor or on welfare,” Ajabi says. “I see a woman come in and she buys a bag of rice, a bag of beans, a bag of flour and a bag of carrots, and I know she knows how to spend her money and on what. She’s smart.”
Akhavan on Sherbrooke, at about 10,000 square feet, is short on bright lights or sterling displays, but long on imported foods from the Middle East, Greece, China, Jamaica and even Mexico. The Pierrefonds store, a former Metro, has 17,000 square feet and is better lit, with more selection and bigger aisles.
Yet the Sherbrooke store averages 1,100 to 1,200 people on a good day, Pierrefonds 800 to 1,000, Ajabi says.
He likes to think he has fashioned his own version of an Iranian bazaar, where he learned the food business from his father before they fled the carnage of the IranIraq War.
Today, Akhavan is a retail and wholesale business worth more than $25 million a year, says Ajabi, with the two supermarkets and a factory/ warehouse from which two brands, Akhavan and Jahan, are packaged and shipped across the country.
The brothers are thinking of opening more stores, maybe four. Ajabi is eyeing Laval and Ville St-Laurent, downtown Montreal or something near the Jean Talon Market.
The plan? “When I see the place, that’s the plan,” Ajabi says.
Though the brothers are equal partners in the store, Ajabi says he is basically the boss. He has travelled more, has more education, knows more about the business. He is there every day at 8 a.m., often in his quilted vest and scarf, to make sure the produce has arrived and the shelves are stocked. His command centre is an office that would look right at home in a salvage yard.
“We are not flashy, showy people,” he laughs.
Unlike many other grocers, he won’t advertise loss leaders because he doesn’t have any.
“I need to make money on everything,” he says. “If I buy a tomato for $2, I might put it on sale for $2.10, but I won’t lose money.”
And he tries to keep away from processed or junk food. Soft drinks are stored out of the way on a bottom shelf in a backroom with sacks of flour, rice, lentils and beans.
“Here we have good food,” he says. “You need vegetables, rice, meats, nuts and cheese.”
On a guided stroll through the aisles, where some Kellogg’s prepared waffles are tucked inside the freezer case, Ajabi shakes his head. “My brother wants these things.”
Steelworker Peter Lisiecki, 29, lives across the street from Akhavan, and it’s his one-stop shop for most everything he eats.
“I went in there and loaded up on everything I needed for a stew,” he says.
“I fill up the crock pot and can eat it for three days and I still have vegetables in the fridge. It cost me $15.”
Lisiecki says he only ventures to the big-name stores for brand-name processed foods like cereals or Kraft Dinner.
Akhavan is the go-to place for nuts and olives, pickled turnips and vine leaves, marinated lamb and shish taouk, and oddities like halal Jamaican patties, rose jam and grape molasses. Everything in the store is halal, Ajabi says. What isn’t halal is kosher.
The brothers have come a long way from their first foray into Canadian retail, a 600-square-foot hole in the wall on Sherbrooke St. W. that they opened in 1989. Success may have flowed from their simple philosophy.
“We look around at what our people need, what our people want,” says Ajabi. “Our job is to serve the people, not to make money. We are rich. But before, when we were poor, we were rich in our hearts.”
His “people,” he says, are the people in the neighbourhood, the poor and the not-so-poor, the people from Greece and Turkey and Iran and China and even from Canada.
“Average people,” he says. “Before we bring something in, we ask ourselves: ‘Can our people afford it?’ If it’s expensive, no, we don’t need it.”