Around the Fourth of July, it’s worth remembering that Mobile’s business community has long been shaped by people who arrived from far beyond Alabama’s borders. Several longtime local entrepreneurs, all naturalized American citizens, say the port city became more than just a place to work – it became home, in ways they never expected when they first arrived.
Reza Hejazi’s story starts in a family bakery in Esfahan, Iran, where he began working at age six. He came to the United States to study at the University of Florida, eventually transferring to the University of South Alabama to finish a civil engineering degree. After struggling to find work in his field, he leaned on the skills he grew up with and, in 1991, opened Food Pak, Mobile’s first international grocery store, in a long-vacant convenience store space on Old Shell Road. More than two decades later, the shop is known as much for its global sandwich menu as its imported pantry staples, and Hejazi’s sons have carried the family business into a third generation. His wife, Nahin, built her own path in Mobile as well, opening a salon on Airport Boulevard in the 1980s before moving into commercial property management.
Makeda Nichols grew up in Ethiopia, the daughter of a doctor and a farmer, and studied chemistry in Germany before falling in love with an American soldier and relocating to Florida. She arrived with only a few dollars to her name and worked as a seamstress and lab technician before a job transfer brought her to Mobile. Drawing on her family’s background in business and a personal understanding of what it means to go without insurance, she eventually became a State Farm agent, running her own Midtown office for three decades. Her brother later followed her to the United States and now owns a downtown Mobile restaurant, drawn to the city in part to help care for their mother.
Christina Lau’s journey to Mobile began when her older sister left Taiwan for the U.S. and encouraged Christina to follow. Like the others, she built a business relationship with customers that felt more like family than transactions, becoming one of several immigrant entrepreneurs whose ventures now feel like fixtures of the local business landscape.
Each of these business owners describes Mobile in strikingly similar terms: friendly, welcoming, and, despite its distance from the countries of their birth, a place that came to feel like home. Their stories reflect a broader pattern across the Gulf Coast, where small, family-run businesses founded by immigrants have added new flavors, services, and traditions to established communities without displacing what made those communities distinct in the first place.
As Mobile continues to grow, these long-running, family-operated businesses stand as reminders that the city’s economic and cultural identity has always been built by people who chose to put down roots here, regardless of where their journey began.