Meet the Toronto couple making waves with a healthier frozen treat
A decade ago, Tamara Al Dip and Yazeed Yasin immigrated from their hometown of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to Toronto with their two young kids in tow. They soon found themselves on the hunt for healthy alternatives to ice cream to give their children, one of which couldn’t consume dairy. “We couldn’t find healthy varieties on freezer shelves,” Yasin recalls. “The main issue is most dairy as well as non-dairy ice creams have added sugars or sweeteners as one of the first two ingredients.”
So, Al Dip decided to make a healthy ice cream alternative in her family’s kitchen. Internet searches led her to a recipe for “nice cream,” made by blending frozen bananas. “Everyone loved it,” Al Dip says. She began tweaking her recipe by adding fruits and nuts to create different textures and flavours.
Friends and other family members loved Al Dip’s ice cream, too. That prompted the couple to consider turning it into a full-fledged business. “We’ve always wanted to start our own business,” Yasin explains. At the time, he was working as a marketing manager for Global News. Al Dip worked in banking before moving to Canada, after which she took a career break. Yasin used his marketing background to conduct research, while Al Dip refined her recipe and developed more flavours. By March 2016, the family had opened Nanashake in North York— the first vegan ice cream parlour in the city. By this time, Yasin had left his marketing career to work full time on Nanashake with Al Dip.
Their risk paid off. The shop flourished, fuelled by a growing interest in veganism. NanaPops, their version of ice cream bars, became one of Nanashake’s bestsellers. Customers asked how they could buy NanaPops in other parts of the city, so the couple turned NanaPops into a packaged product in late 2019. “We ordered some packaging off Uline, slapped some stickers on it and started approaching local stores with our most popular products,” Yasin says. “Initially, we got a lot of ‘noes,’ but eventually, some of the stores decided to give us a chance.”
Their first retailer was the now-defunct Toronto health food grocer Noah’s Natural Foods. The product sold well, so the couple added more local stores to the mix, giving Al Dip and Yasin the confidence to approach the first major retailer: Sobeys. “We got in as part of their local program,” Yasin explains. “Within a year, we were being sold in 20 of their stores.”
When COVID hit, Nanashake’s retail shop took a hit due to mandatory closures. So, in January 2022, when their retail lease was up for renewal, the couple closed their store and pivoted fully into a CPG business. “It was a little bit sad,” Al Dip says of the store’s closure. “I spent a lot of time there creating new recipes and meeting our community.” But, the couple knew it was the best decision for their business.
That same year, Al Dip and Yasin decided to reformulate NanaPops. The product hadn’t been selling well in some stores and was delisted from a major retailer. The couple reached out to their customers for feedback on how they could improve their products. “Tamara worked on the formulation to make it creamier,” Yasin explains. “We also added more flavours as well as updated our packaging to make it more sustainable.”
The revamped product launched in April 2022, and the couple was pleased to see better sales from NanaPops 2.0. They even got relisted at the grocer who had taken their products off the shelves. “It has now become one of our best-performing retailers,” Yasin says. That same year, NanaPops won two prestigious awards: the Sobeys Local Innovation Award and the UNFI Pitch Slam Competition.
Today, NanaPops are now sold in more than 600 stores in six provinces: Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. One of their biggest recent wins was landing on the shelves of Whole Foods Markets across Canada. “That was a dream for us,” Al Dip says. “Nanashake’s retail store was across the street from the Whole Foods Market in North York. We would source our bananas there and we used to say to each other: ‘Can you imagine that our product could be there one day?’”
Looking ahead, Yasin and Al Dip have plans to expand into the U.S. market in 2026. They’ve also been experimenting with innovative merchandising. Recently, in 21 stores, they’ve been placing NanaPops for sale next to the bananas they’re made with. “We’re the first ice cream brand to merchandise its products in the produce sections of some of the biggest food retailers in Canada,” Yasin says. “No other ice cream brand has been able to do this.”
This article was first published in Canadian Grocer’s November 2024 issue.
