November 12, 2025 • 9 mins
Paul Corvino sits down with Ike Shehadah, CEO of Ikes Love & Sandwiches. Ike's Love & Sandwiches has over 800 sandwiches for everyone, whether you're a carnivore, vegetarian, or vegan.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is CEOs you should know, with division president of iHeartMedia,
Paul Corvino.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Today we're here with Ike Shahada, the founder of Ike's
Love and Sandwiches, a chain of over one hundred and
twelve restaurants. Welcome Ike, Thank you. So let's tell us
where it got started. Where'd you grow up?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
I grew up in San Francisco, born and raised there,
and that's also where I was born in the city.
When I say San Francisco, I mean the city.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And what was your life like growing up? Were your
family in the restaurant business? Was there something that drew
you to the business?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I was really in the eating okay, And back when
I was a kid five years old, six years old,
my mom got sick and tired of me saying, hey,
feed me, feed me. And I remember her telling me,
I'm going to make three meals a day, breakfast, lunch,
and dinner. If you want anything else, here's the refrigerator,
here's a microwave, and she's like, have at it. And
(00:52):
that's kind of where my love of culinary or creating foods.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Wow, did you study the culinary arts at all?
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Just trial and error with my back when I and
when I went away to college, and that's where I
realized I needed to have recipes because I would make
something and this would be really delicious, and then I
would not know how to recreate it because I didn't
write it down.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So you're in college, you're making sandwiches. What's the next move?
How did you eventually wind up in these business? What
were the steps you took? What was your first job?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, the first part was I end up getting kicked
out of college for essentially not trying to graduate or whatever.
They don't allow part times that happened to you, of course,
of course.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Well it's funny how it always works that.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Way, and in a weird way.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
I did learn how to cook at college, Like this
is where I learned, not by taking cooking classes, but
by creating these recipes.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So what's your first job at this point? You're not
here now out of college.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
What do you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
So my family had a supermarket. It's family owned business,
and I started working there a couple of years later
through the help of my father, and I end up
becoming partner in the business. Then our meat market guy,
he decides to retire. He tries to find somebody to
buy his business. Nobody buys it, so he retires, and
now we have this whole deli case that was a
(02:05):
meat market, and I go, well, we need to fill
this space. So I was like, I'll open up a
little deli coffee shop and we would get at lunchtime
forty or fifty people. And then I noticed that, Wow,
it's a lot of work, and I wasn't making a
lot of money, so I kind of didn't want to
do the work and closed it down a couple months
in because I didn't want to run it anymore. Then
(02:28):
in two thousand and four, end up having to sell
my house, sell my car, and then my business went
out of business. The supermarket we get the power turned
off by PGNE.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
All right, so now you're out of business. You've got
no income coming in, so what do you do.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I d'm getting evicted, as I should because I was
in paying rent for several months. I ended up having
this brilliant plant. If it can be homeless, might as
well go homeless in Hawaii instead of homeless on San Francisco.
It's freezing now. Eventually, how I got away from Hawaii
was I figured I could do this forever, and this
is not the life for me. So I chose flying
(03:03):
back to the Bay where I didn't actually have a plan,
and then I did. I thought of a lot of things.
I was like, oh, yeah, I should you know where
I should work? I should work at Victoria's Secret. And
then I did that for a couple of years. So
I worked was working for other people, and then I realized, actually,
the hack is working for yourself. There's no ceiling and
(03:27):
you get to choose what you do. I got into
selling real estate. Unfortunately it was two thousand and six
and two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Yeah, sub crisis.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
I get there and within thirty days I closed the
deal in Berlin game through family member, and that paid
I don't know, fifty K my set of the commission.
So that lasted me a good amount of time. Slowly
but surely. I couldn't close deals because the banks just
weren't you know, you know what happened, so the banks
just weren't lending. Even you'd be in contract, it's time
(03:58):
to pay, and that wells Fargo's like nope, we're not
going to give you any money. And so I got
really creative and I was like, well, I can do leases.
And as I'm researching there's a location sixteenth in Sanchez
and the Castro. I go look at it, and I
walk in there and I just felt really great about
that space. That space ends up becoming the first IKES resistance.
(04:18):
This is in San Francisco on sixteenth in Sanchez, right
the very first IKES. So I went in there and
it felt great. I stood outside, I looked at it's
on it's right off of the corner, so sixteenth in market,
major corner in the city, and because it was off
the corner, the rent was really low. So that's basically
all that led to me going in there, finding the location,
(04:39):
really liking it, and that ends up becoming the first IKES.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
And so you went in there and how did it
take off? We made really good sandwiches, apparently.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
So I open get the place open on Halloween two
thousand and seven and ended up not selling anything. So
that devastated me. I was dejected, basically closed for a week,
reopened on November seventh, and thought, Okay, I'm I'm never
going to not sell anything again. So I'm like, I'm
just gonna stand outside. I'm gonna say, hey, how you doing.
Every single person that walks by, and anybody that responds
(05:09):
I'm going to offer to buy them lunch. Nine people
allowed me to make them sandwiches on the second day,
and then from there on, I just kept thinking, how
can I get more people in, How can I get
more people in, getting creative with ideas, How can I
send out coupons to folks and get attention?
Speaker 3 (05:25):
And that's how I started. That was day one, that
was day two.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
And king before you had a profitable business.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Well, I'd end up paying myself for two and a
half years. I tracked my hours though. Every time money
came in, I would go, Okay, well, what I need
is somebody to help me chop tomatoes and cut the
lettuce and the cheese, and so I'd just hire somebody.
I had very low expectations of being paid at that time.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
So how long is the store going before you open
up another store?
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Second store? The opportunity came to me a little over
a year in.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
At this point, you got the one story, you're showing
good numbers. Feel to borrow money.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
So I borrow money from my girlfriend at the time,
her mom.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
She goes, I'll lend you the money, no interest, but
you need to open up a She lived in Santa Rosa, California,
but you need to open up an Ikes in Santa
Rosa as the interest, and it sounds like.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
It was the same name. It was Ikes Love Sandwiches.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
But back then it was called Ike's Place. So my
first three locations were called Ike's Place. And four years
in we changed the name to Ikes Love in Sandwiches
and put my faces the logo.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Very cool logo. It looks great and everyone knows their
name now. And how many locations do you have.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Today right now? Is one hundred and thirty three one.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Hundred and thirty three local. It went from homeless on
the beach to one hundred and thirty three locations in
a pretty short period of time.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
It's been eighteen years.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Eighteen years? And where where are they located?
Speaker 1 (06:37):
So the nine states we're in, we're predominantly in California.
Started in San Francisco, there's about fifty in the Bay
and then the rest of California there's about another fifty,
mostly in LA and Orange County. Then we got a
bunch in San Diego, then Phoenix. So I've got fourteen
in Phoenix, four in Nevada, two in Vegas too, in Reno,
we're in five in Denver.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
As you start opening up stores, do you find obviously
your sandwiches are great sandwiches. I love the sandwich. I've
got one in front of me right here. I know
how good these sandwiches are. I've had them before, So
you obviously have a great product that people are going
to come back for. Like you were able to do
that in one location, and you're there, so the customer
service is good. You got a second store, even a
(07:20):
third store, you could keep an eye on all of them.
How do you maintain the quality and keep the store
operating where you needed to operate to grow the business?
I mean it gets difficult as you start growing.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Well.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I think it's a myth. So people said, you're not
supposed to have three locations in three years. But I
did that, and I noticed that it wasn't difficult, And
opening the second one, I made less mistakes than I
did the first, Open the third, less mistakes in the second,
which was less than the first, the fourth, and so forth.
That I saw that because my mind was always occupied
on the business. Having three stores, four stores, five stores,
(07:56):
ten stores, twelve stores, there was more bandwidth. So I
hate doing payroll. You're gonna do payroll. I hate doing schedule.
You do the schedule. I hate whatever that is. If
say you sucked at doing payroll, but I know no
longer had to worry about payroll, and I can focus
on serving customers or serving food. It is better than
the that the scheduling. This person does the schedule.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
You're doing that. But you've got stores well over the place.
So how do you I mean, it's hard for you
to keep an eye even on the service. Then so
many different locations.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
You get what you tolerate. And same with this business,
any business. If you don't tolerate that, then you won't
get it.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Well, this is this is a really great story. So
if those of you listening, if you haven't had a
sandwich at at Ikes, there's locations I'm sure near you hopefully. Yeah. Well,
especially you can go online and see the locator and
you'll be able to find find it.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, the other states we're in. We're in Louisiana, so
we're in New Orleans. We got one random one in Michigan,
in Mount Pleasant. One in New Orleans. You can get delivery.
We also deliver on our own app. It's cheaper delivery,
and you also get what's the app discount. It's the
Ikes Rewards app, Apple Store or the Samsung Store.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
So get your Ikes app. You've got to try one
of these sandwiches again. My favorite here is the Turkey
roast beef Salami. Their famous godfather saw us and provolone
for a guy named Corvino. That's the perfect sandwich perfect.
I'm glad to grab that one. Ike. Thank you so
much for coming on. We really enjoyed your story. And
this is once again here with Ike Shahada, founder of
(09:33):
Ikes Love and Sandwiches. This is Paul Corvino, the vision
president of iHeartMedia, saying thanks for listening to another episode
of CEOs you Should Know.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Listen to CEOs you Should Know on the iHeartRadio app
This is CEOs you should know, with division president of iHeartMedia,
Paul Corvino.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Today we're here with Ike Shahada, the founder of Ike's
Love and Sandwiches, a chain of over one hundred and
twelve restaurants. Welcome Ike, Thank you. So let's tell us
where it got started. Where'd you grow up?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
I grew up in San Francisco, born and raised there,
and that's also where I was born in the city.
When I say San Francisco, I mean the city.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And what was your life like growing up? Were your
family in the restaurant business? Was there something that drew
you to the business?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I was really in the eating okay, And back when
I was a kid five years old, six years old,
my mom got sick and tired of me saying, hey,
feed me, feed me. And I remember her telling me,
I'm going to make three meals a day, breakfast, lunch,
and dinner. If you want anything else, here's the refrigerator,
here's a microwave, and she's like, have at it. And
(00:52):
that's kind of where my love of culinary or creating foods.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Wow, did you study the culinary arts at all?
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Just trial and error with my back when I and
when I went away to college, and that's where I
realized I needed to have recipes because I would make
something and this would be really delicious, and then I
would not know how to recreate it because I didn't
write it down.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So you're in college, you're making sandwiches. What's the next move?
How did you eventually wind up in these business? What
were the steps you took? What was your first job?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, the first part was I end up getting kicked
out of college for essentially not trying to graduate or whatever.
They don't allow part times that happened to you, of course,
of course.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Well it's funny how it always works that.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Way, and in a weird way.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
I did learn how to cook at college, Like this
is where I learned, not by taking cooking classes, but
by creating these recipes.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
So what's your first job at this point? You're not
here now out of college.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
What do you doing?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
So my family had a supermarket. It's family owned business,
and I started working there a couple of years later
through the help of my father, and I end up
becoming partner in the business. Then our meat market guy,
he decides to retire. He tries to find somebody to
buy his business. Nobody buys it, so he retires, and
now we have this whole deli case that was a
(02:05):
meat market, and I go, well, we need to fill
this space. So I was like, I'll open up a
little deli coffee shop and we would get at lunchtime
forty or fifty people. And then I noticed that, Wow,
it's a lot of work, and I wasn't making a
lot of money, so I kind of didn't want to
do the work and closed it down a couple months
in because I didn't want to run it anymore. Then
(02:28):
in two thousand and four, end up having to sell
my house, sell my car, and then my business went
out of business. The supermarket we get the power turned
off by PGNE.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
All right, so now you're out of business. You've got
no income coming in, so what do you do.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I d'm getting evicted, as I should because I was
in paying rent for several months. I ended up having
this brilliant plant. If it can be homeless, might as
well go homeless in Hawaii instead of homeless on San Francisco.
It's freezing now. Eventually, how I got away from Hawaii
was I figured I could do this forever, and this
is not the life for me. So I chose flying
(03:03):
back to the Bay where I didn't actually have a plan,
and then I did. I thought of a lot of things.
I was like, oh, yeah, I should you know where
I should work? I should work at Victoria's Secret. And
then I did that for a couple of years. So
I worked was working for other people, and then I realized, actually,
the hack is working for yourself. There's no ceiling and
(03:27):
you get to choose what you do. I got into
selling real estate. Unfortunately it was two thousand and six
and two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Yeah, sub crisis.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
I get there and within thirty days I closed the
deal in Berlin game through family member, and that paid
I don't know, fifty K my set of the commission.
So that lasted me a good amount of time. Slowly
but surely. I couldn't close deals because the banks just
weren't you know, you know what happened, so the banks
just weren't lending. Even you'd be in contract, it's time
(03:58):
to pay, and that wells Fargo's like nope, we're not
going to give you any money. And so I got
really creative and I was like, well, I can do leases.
And as I'm researching there's a location sixteenth in Sanchez
and the Castro. I go look at it, and I
walk in there and I just felt really great about
that space. That space ends up becoming the first IKES resistance.
(04:18):
This is in San Francisco on sixteenth in Sanchez, right
the very first IKES. So I went in there and
it felt great. I stood outside, I looked at it's
on it's right off of the corner, so sixteenth in market,
major corner in the city, and because it was off
the corner, the rent was really low. So that's basically
all that led to me going in there, finding the location,
(04:39):
really liking it, and that ends up becoming the first IKES.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
And so you went in there and how did it
take off? We made really good sandwiches, apparently.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
So I open get the place open on Halloween two
thousand and seven and ended up not selling anything. So
that devastated me. I was dejected, basically closed for a week,
reopened on November seventh, and thought, Okay, I'm I'm never
going to not sell anything again. So I'm like, I'm
just gonna stand outside. I'm gonna say, hey, how you doing.
Every single person that walks by, and anybody that responds
(05:09):
I'm going to offer to buy them lunch. Nine people
allowed me to make them sandwiches on the second day,
and then from there on, I just kept thinking, how
can I get more people in, How can I get
more people in, getting creative with ideas, How can I
send out coupons to folks and get attention?
Speaker 3 (05:25):
And that's how I started. That was day one, that
was day two.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
And king before you had a profitable business.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Well, I'd end up paying myself for two and a
half years. I tracked my hours though. Every time money
came in, I would go, Okay, well, what I need
is somebody to help me chop tomatoes and cut the
lettuce and the cheese, and so I'd just hire somebody.
I had very low expectations of being paid at that time.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
So how long is the store going before you open
up another store?
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Second store? The opportunity came to me a little over
a year in.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
At this point, you got the one story, you're showing
good numbers. Feel to borrow money.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
So I borrow money from my girlfriend at the time,
her mom.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
She goes, I'll lend you the money, no interest, but
you need to open up a She lived in Santa Rosa, California,
but you need to open up an Ikes in Santa
Rosa as the interest, and it sounds like.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
It was the same name. It was Ikes Love Sandwiches.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
But back then it was called Ike's Place. So my
first three locations were called Ike's Place. And four years
in we changed the name to Ikes Love in Sandwiches
and put my faces the logo.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Very cool logo. It looks great and everyone knows their
name now. And how many locations do you have.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Today right now? Is one hundred and thirty three one.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Hundred and thirty three local. It went from homeless on
the beach to one hundred and thirty three locations in
a pretty short period of time.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
It's been eighteen years.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Eighteen years? And where where are they located?
Speaker 1 (06:37):
So the nine states we're in, we're predominantly in California.
Started in San Francisco, there's about fifty in the Bay
and then the rest of California there's about another fifty,
mostly in LA and Orange County. Then we got a
bunch in San Diego, then Phoenix. So I've got fourteen
in Phoenix, four in Nevada, two in Vegas too, in Reno,
we're in five in Denver.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
As you start opening up stores, do you find obviously
your sandwiches are great sandwiches. I love the sandwich. I've
got one in front of me right here. I know
how good these sandwiches are. I've had them before, So
you obviously have a great product that people are going
to come back for. Like you were able to do
that in one location, and you're there, so the customer
service is good. You got a second store, even a
(07:20):
third store, you could keep an eye on all of them.
How do you maintain the quality and keep the store
operating where you needed to operate to grow the business?
I mean it gets difficult as you start growing.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Well.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I think it's a myth. So people said, you're not
supposed to have three locations in three years. But I
did that, and I noticed that it wasn't difficult, And
opening the second one, I made less mistakes than I
did the first, Open the third, less mistakes in the second,
which was less than the first, the fourth, and so forth.
That I saw that because my mind was always occupied
on the business. Having three stores, four stores, five stores,
(07:56):
ten stores, twelve stores, there was more bandwidth. So I
hate doing payroll. You're gonna do payroll. I hate doing schedule.
You do the schedule. I hate whatever that is. If
say you sucked at doing payroll, but I know no
longer had to worry about payroll, and I can focus
on serving customers or serving food. It is better than
the that the scheduling. This person does the schedule.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
You're doing that. But you've got stores well over the place.
So how do you I mean, it's hard for you
to keep an eye even on the service. Then so
many different locations.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
You get what you tolerate. And same with this business,
any business. If you don't tolerate that, then you won't
get it.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Well, this is this is a really great story. So
if those of you listening, if you haven't had a
sandwich at at Ikes, there's locations I'm sure near you hopefully. Yeah. Well,
especially you can go online and see the locator and
you'll be able to find find it.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Yeah, the other states we're in. We're in Louisiana, so
we're in New Orleans. We got one random one in Michigan,
in Mount Pleasant. One in New Orleans. You can get delivery.
We also deliver on our own app. It's cheaper delivery,
and you also get what's the app discount. It's the
Ikes Rewards app, Apple Store or the Samsung Store.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
So get your Ikes app. You've got to try one
of these sandwiches again. My favorite here is the Turkey
roast beef Salami. Their famous godfather saw us and provolone
for a guy named Corvino. That's the perfect sandwich perfect.
I'm glad to grab that one. Ike. Thank you so
much for coming on. We really enjoyed your story. And
this is once again here with Ike Shahada, founder of
(09:33):
Ikes Love and Sandwiches. This is Paul Corvino, the vision
president of iHeartMedia, saying thanks for listening to another episode
of CEOs you Should Know.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Listen to CEOs you Should Know on the iHeartRadio app
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