As Juice Dudez continues to grow in Ottawa, the brand has started exploring franchising by taking a pretty different approach than most brands.
“Instead of looking for passive investors, we’re intentionally looking for owner-operators who want to run the business themselves and build a long-term career in hospitality,” said Nasr Nasr, Founder and CEO of the brand.
“Most franchises select partners based on capital. We’re doing the opposite — we’re selecting based on character, work ethic, and alignment with our mission. If the right operator doesn’t have capital, we’re open to structuring a path with them.
“It’s slower and probably harder, but our belief is that culture and product quality only survive if the people running the stores genuinely care about the craft and the customer experience.”
Nasr said the company story starts in the 1800s, in the fruit farms of Lebanon. Generation after generation, Nasr’s family grew real fruit with real flavour — long before “organic” was a buzzword. When Nasr moved to Canada in 2017, he expected to finish his engineering degree. Instead, he ended up washing dishes, delivering pizzas, and grinding through seven-day work weeks in sales.
He was “successful” by society’s standards but “completely miserable.”
One line from a book flipped everything upside down: “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Nasr dropped everything and chased what actually mattered: food, people, and building something real.
He saw what nobody else seemed to notice that drinks were stuck in a broken trade-off. They were either tasty and loaded with junk or healthy and tasted like punishment. So in 2019, Juice Dudez was born to break that rule. Real fruit. Real flavour. Drinks that taste amazing and make you feel good.
“And because joy deserves dessert, we started crafting sweets from the best chocolate on earth. We had no idea what we were doing. We messed up. We learned. And we refused to cut corners — even when a global pandemic tried to knock us out. Instead of shrinking, we got sharper. Better recipes. Better experience. Better reasons to show up every day,” said Nasr.
“People noticed. Lines formed. And what started as one little shop became a movement. Today, Juice Dudez isn’t just about juice or dessert. It’s about rejecting boring, fake, and forgettable and choosing joy, flavour, and community instead. It’s about turning small moments into better days and proving that “healthy” and “delicious” should never be opposites. This is our mission: to make people happier and healthier, one cup at a time — and to make it impossible not to smile while we do it.”
Nasr said the brand currently has four locations in Ottawa, and it’s opening two more — one more in Ottawa and one in Toronto in the next couple of months.
“Our goal is to be everywhere in the world very, very soon,” he said.
Two current locations are corporately owned and two of them are franchises.
Going forward the plan is to have all new locations as franchises.
Its oldest location was 900 square feet, and the biggest location is 3,000 square feet.
“Moving forward, I think our footprint is going to be 2,000 square feet on average,” explained Nasr.
The typical customer is millennials or Gen Z, and they’re typically foodies. They love food, they love exploring, they love traveling, and they like exploring new things.
“We study the neighbourhoods we want to open in, and if we see a higher concentration of these demographics, this is how we know that this would be a good neighborhood for us.
“I think what we’re doing is special, and the way we’re going to grow it — we’re choosing the slow way. We’re not choosing the quick, easy money way because we’re here to make an impact. We’re here to make people happy. We’re here to make a difference.
“We’re not going to compromise that for growth. We’re going to prioritize character over capital when it comes to franchisees, and that’s how we’re going to stay true to our mission.”
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