HEART OF THE EMPIRE

Uka Solanki heads the Big Saver Foods empire with over 600 employees in Southern California. But his heart is really in education, a passion imbued by his mother. That accounts for the salutary philanthropy that Solanki has spawned in the field of education both in India and the U.S., Michel W. Potts reports.

Alarge framed photograph of an elderly woman draped with a garland of yellow flowers hangs on the wall across from Uka Solanki’s desk. The woman is Kadaviben G. Solanki, his 102-year-old mother, and whichever way he turns, her gaze always settles on him. When he speaks of her, his tone is a mix of reverence, affection and awe.

Like his father, Solanki’s mother was illiterate, “but somehow she got it in her head that her children had to be educated,” Solanki says. “She was such a forceful person that if my brothers and I missed school, we knew we were going to get it.”

Today, at the age of 61, Solanki heads the $6 million Big Saver Foods empire, with 600 employees and 12 markets scattered throughout Los Angeles County, with one in Santa Ana, another in Riverside and one more on the verge of opening within a month’s time in Pico Rivera. Yet, like his mother, he places the greatest premium on education.

Seven years ago, he instituted an annual $1,000 scholarship program in which five scholarships are awarded to his employees or their children to be used toward their college education. “Somewhere I got it into my head that you can help more people and improve their lives through education than by any other manner,” he simply explains.

His concern with education did not stop there. Five years ago, he provided 40 scholarships, ten each to schools in La Puente, Lincoln Heights, Santa Ana and Highland Park, where $400 Savings Bonds were given to eighth-graders that went toward their college education as well. Then two years ago he adopted junior high schools in Highland Park and El Sereno, setting up a reading program that helped non-English speaking students learn English, and donated another $15,000 to help stock their libraries.

“It is a community participation reading program, where our employees are supposed to go and read with the kids,” Solanki says.

At UCLA, his initial contribution of $35,000 was the seed money that brought in the $200,000 that helped to establish the Sardar Patel Dissertation Award in 1999, which awards $10,000 to those candidates who write the best doctoral thesis on any Indian subject except science.

He did it, he tells Indian Life & Style, simply because “Sardar Patel is a favorite of mine; he was more nationalist and a more practical person than most of the politicians.”

Only months ago, after donating $25,000 to the Orange City Library to help expand its book selection, Solanki gave $500,000 to the University of California at Long Beach for the Yadunandan India Studies Center, named after his wife’s great-grandfather, a renowned educationist, “and already we have an individual who has given $200,000 to create a lecture series in his name,” he explains, adding that a project is currently in the works to bridge the university with others in India with an exchange student program.

His belief in the betterment of lives through education also extended to India. In 1986, Solanki contributed $100,000 toward building the Nalini Solanki-Chatralay school in Junagadh, Gujarat, named after his wife, which takes in girls between the ages of 10 to 18. The school educates more than 1,200 girls of all religions and races each year, and also has an adjacent facility for handicapped girls, who receive free tuition and textbooks.

The school has over the years grown to include a college, “and last year, they got special permission from the state government to train teachers, and so now they can train 100 teachers for the schools,” Solanki proudly notes. He is also founding president of the Indian Council for the Advancement of Education in India which, through reputable NGOs in India, has since 1998 been promoting high school computer labs, each with an average of 15 computers, set up by Indian American donors living in this country who wish the labs to be set up in their home states.

“In the beginning it was costing $15,000 a lab, but as prices have gone down, it can be done for about $7,000,” Solanki explains.

Ironically, Solanki’s own education was a bit scattershot. Growing up in Upleta, Gujarat, 40 kilometers from where Mahatma Gandhi was born, he thought of becoming a doctor. But after graduating from Ahmedabad in 1968 with a degree in chemistry, he discovered that he didn’t have the 20 lakh rupees fee required to enter medical college.

Still, determined to become a doctor, he studied biology instead, hoping that a degree in that subject would be his ticket into medical school, but his score on his final exam just wasn’t good enough. Undeterred, Solanki went on to Modasa Science College, this time working on a master’s degree in organic chemistry, having gotten the idea that if he couldn’t be a doctor, he could at least remain somewhat associated with the field of medicine by becoming a pharmacist.

A year later he dropped out when two friends invited him to join them in setting up a sugar factory near his hometown. Sugar was a booming business in those days, and being a farmer’s son, “I thought it was a win-win situation, since I knew about sugar cane farming,” Solanki recalls. “With my luck, the same year I went into the sugar business, it was the worst year ever for sugar, because the cost of harvesting was more than the product.”

His going bust turned out to be a windfall of sorts. While still a student at Modasa College, he had applied to the University of Southern California. With the application still pending, he filled out the remaining forms and 30 days later received his acceptance. To prove he had enough funds to support himself as a student, he borrowed 25,000 rupees from his friends, and then took out a loan in the same amount from the Bank of Baroda to pay them back.

Believing himself to be financially secure, and with all the time in the world to pay off the bank loan, Solanki barely lasted a semester. The USC administration required that he take 12 units of English, but at $69 a unit, the courses were eating up his savings. To make ends meet, at least where his education was concerned, he transferred to Pacific State University, a small technical school that was affordable but required that he change his major to electrical engineering.

He graduated in 1972, the same year a drought hit Gujarat, leaving him without any financial support from home. Desperate for money, Solanki convinced the INS to issue him a part-time work permit. As luck would have it, he found out he was eligible for residency. After paying an attorney $150, Solanki got his Green Card, but with the war in Vietnam still going on, “the only catch was, I had to apply for Selective Service,” he recounts.

With an arranged marriage to Nalini pending, Solanki returned to India. Unlike more recently, when an American-educated Indian with a Green Card is considered a great catch, the parents of a prospective bride at that time were far more fearful of their daughter living overseas, where nothing could be done if anything went wrong. Fortunately for Solanki, the uncle of his future bride was a member of Parliament who knew Solanki’s uncle and vouched for Solanki’s character, assuaging any fears Nalini’s parents might have had.

On his return to Los Angeles, Solanki shared an apartment with a friend while he worked two jobs. From three in the afternoon to ten at night, he grew silicon crystals for a semiconductor company near the LAX airport. Then he raced down to Gardena, where he worked from 11 at night to seven in the morning performing quality control tests on cables and wires.

A year and a half later, when Nalini arrived, the Solankis moved to Inglewood. Seeing how well a friend was doing in the drive-through dairy business, Solanki borrowed $20,000 from friends and bought one of his own in Redondo Beach.

Three years later he sold the business when two friends offered him the chance to be a silent partner in their 8,000 square foot supermarket in Torrance, which all three sold a year later for $90,000. With his one-third share, together with another $30,000 from one of the partners, Tulshi Savani, Solanki bought his first Big Saver Foods market in Lincoln Heights.

Located north of Chinatown, the area was solidly Hispanic. His market at that time didn’t cater exclusively to the Hispanic market, “but the Hispanics did consume more meat and produce, which were good mark-up items,” Solanki recalls. As he learned more about meat, he hired Jesse Jesus Maldonado as his new butcher. “I hired him in 1979 and he’s still with me today.”

With Savani doing the ordering and buying, Solanki worked as the store manager, overseeing three check stands and eight employees. “It was a learning process for me, because I was not aware of a lot of brand names, which took me more than a year to learn,” he recounts, adding that along the way he had picked up enough Spanish that “I can get by anywhere I go in any of the Latin countries.”

After a little more than a year in the business, Savani sold his share to Solanki, “and so it was then that I became a jack of all trades – ordering, stocking, running the front – and once a week Nalini (who later became vice-president of the company) would come in and help me out.”

Working from nine in the morning to nine at night, Solanki placed greater emphasis on customer relations. Back then, a market was the center of the Hispanic community, where they could cash their checks and send money orders home. Despite the local competition, “we had such good customer relations that our business was growing every day,” Solanki says. “The market was a good money-making store.”

In those days, the power of the unions, which focused on mainly the chain markets with a large employee force, was waning and did not bother with businesses as small as Solanki’s. Though he paid less than union wages, his employees remained loyal because they could work as many hours a week as they wanted and were paid overtime. “So they were making money overall,” Solanki points out. “It was a win-win situation for us and a win-win situation for them.”

In 1980, after he bought a former Bob’s Market in North Hollywood and a 42-unit motel in Corona, Solanki brought over his two brothers, Jiva and Bhikhu, and their families from Gujarat, and each brother was given a 25 percent partnership in both the new market and the motel, where they worked and earned wages as well.

Four years later, Solanki bought his third Big Saver Foods market in South Pasadena, which measured 13,000 square feet, double the size of his first market. It, too, catered to a large Hispanic community, “and by then, I started feeling more comfortable in catering to Hispanic customers (since) I knew abut their needs, their holidays, their buying habits,” he explains.

His success was not without its drawbacks. In the 1992 riots following the Rodney King verdict, Solanki lost two stores, each approximately 10,000 square feet in size, which he had owned for close to a year, and as much as $600,000 in inventory. “Everything went down the drain,” Solanki says.

His business nevertheless continued to expand. With his son Harish in charge of construction and remodeling the stores, and his daughter Jyoti handling the public relations and legal work, Solanki reached the point where he could offer his employees medical insurance and 401K plans in addition to the scholarships and annual Christmas parties. “We still try to keep a family atmosphere as much as we can,” says Solanki, who for his efforts was named Progressive Grocer’s 2001 “Grocer of the Year.”

In 2002, Solanki was named “Entrepreneur of the Year” for the greater Los Angeles area by Ernst & Young, and he was the first non-Rotarian to receive the Paul P. Harris Award, the highest Rotarian honor, for his international humanitarianism.

The greater his success, the greater his philanthropy, including the $25,000 he donated toward the Gandhi statue in Riverside, the $13,000 he gave to the survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the money he helped raise for those affected by Hurricane Katrina, and the village he and others adopted in Kutch soon after the earthquake. “But mainly I spend my money on education – buying books and computers – wherever people can better their lives,” he says.

Solanki believes that philanthropy is innate, not manufactured. “It’s not to get your photo taken or get some fame. There are some people who have everything that God has given to them but they don’t give a penny to anyone,” he says.

“I think it’s some kind of chemistry you’re born with. Somehow it has become natural to me to help others.”