Hifa Maleki headshot

Bringing Latin-inspired cuisine to Edmonton

Mario Toneguzzi |

Hifa Maleki specializes in fast-paced strategic planning for aggressive growth models and is known for building, scaling, and executing brand and business systems/best practices to support strategic, successful and sustainable growth.

For the last 13+ years, she has been incredibly active and relentlessly committed to building and growing great franchise brands in Canada. She has driven unparalleled growth across Canada through effective Strategic Growth Planning which includes impacting high-level achievement in both Franchise and Unit Level Sales. She has been directly responsible for the growth of Orangetheory Fitness in Canada, building over 110 locations within 4 years while ensuring that quality and company values were being retained and delivered through each location. She believes in working with talented people, training, developing, and coaching them to drive the success of the companies she works with. She feels very strongly that the success of a brand is highly connected to the people behind it at corporate and the people in front of it, the staff. Her approach to successful business development is to appropriately and carefully select great people, select great real estate, and work very hard to protect the brand promise for the consumers.

Hifa is currently an owner and managing partner at El Corazon, El Beso and Pablo Cocktail Lounge. For El Corazon, as a new brand, she built all the systems, processes, training, and resources to ensure the business was set up for success operationally and supports managing the operations with the current management team. Hifa is also incredibly experienced with cocktail and menu development, working closely with her business partner and the Chef to ensure that all brands in this group’s portfolio are aligned with the respective brands while maintaining profitable cost control thresholds.

Prior to Orangetheory Fitness, she was in the hospitality industry in senior-level positions for over 12+ years. Operating one the busiest Joey Restaurant in Canada with over $11M annual revenue then joining the Famoso Neapolitan Pizza brand and supporting its growth of over 40+ locations within her 4 years with the company.


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