How A Family Chain Outsmarted Inflation

Tahini’s Restaurants, a Canadian fast-casual restaurant chain specializing in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, integrated bitcoin into its business in 2020 and has been refining its strategy ever since. Today Bitcoin makes up over 70% of their reserves and has made a critical difference in their expansion to 62 restaurants in just over a decade.

“We just kept putting more and more money into bitcoin.” Omar Hamam, CEO and co-founder of Tahini’s, told Bitcoin Magazine. Omar and his brother Aly Hamam founded the company in 2012, starting with one restaurant in London, Ontario. Tahini’s has since grown to 62 restaurants across the country, their expansion amplified by their adoption of an early bitcoin treasury strategy, partially inspired by Michael Saylor in 2020. The bold move gave them a pool of capital with which they could compete with the giants of the fast-casual food industry.

“We’re competing with McDonald’s, and Chipotle,” said Omar, adding, “All these companies have more money than 100 Tahini’s. So, to have an advantage like that, where we have a treasury and a balance sheet strategy that puts us in a comfortable place financially, that lets us preserve our wealth over time and space … it was the best decision we’ve ever made for our business.”

The company has implemented multiple innovative strategies throughout its journey, including the deployment of Bitcoin ATMs to many of their franchises, a new media strategy that, according to Aly, has netted them “three billion views over the last five years across all social media platforms,” including a YouTube channel with over 3.2 million subscribers and, of course, their bitcoin treasury strategy.

Aly’s Fascination with Bitcoin Post-COVID, Influenced by Egyptian Currency Devaluation

Aly Hamam was the main driver behind the restaurant’s bitcoin strategy. Shaped by his family’s experiences with the Egyptian pound’s aggressive devaluations over the past 20 years, the catastrophic consequences of runaway inflation were deeply personal to him, an experience that set him up well to discover bitcoin during the March 2020 market crash. “So, I came from Egypt, and over the last two decades, I’ve seen the Egyptian pound drop probably 85% or something like that. And I’ve seen our family struggle. I’ve seen my parents struggle. My parents had money sitting in Egypt over that time. I’ve seen their life savings get wiped away. Sometimes with Egypt, it happens like flash crashes. So, the government will come in and can just devalue the currency within a month, 50%,” Aly recalled.

When the…