Hamdi Ulukaya

• 1. Introduction

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  Hamdi Ulukaya cannot say for certain when he was born. His Kurdish family herded animals and often moved with them between seasonal pastures, and he arrived during one of their treks into the mountains. Nobody recorded the day. He settled on the 26th of October and has used it ever since. The year is given as 1972. Decades later he would run Chobani, a strained yogurt company in the United States, and rank among the 300 richest people in the world. His fortune stood at $13.7 billion as of April 2026. How does a herder's son from eastern Turkey end up at the head of a leading American yogurt brand? What did he do differently from the established food companies around him? And what has he chosen to do with the money?

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• 2. Shepherd's Son

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  In İliç, a small village in the Erzincan region of Turkey, the Ulukaya family kept sheep and goats and ran a dairy farm near the Euphrates River. Hamdi grew up with six siblings, and the household made its own cheese and yogurt. He has spoken often about his commitment to Kurdish rights. He cites the Turkish state's oppression of its Kurdish minority as one reason he left the country.

  Ankara University's School of Political Science was where he studied before leaving. In 1994 he moved to the United States to learn English at Adelphi University on Long Island, New York. In 1997 he went upstate and transferred to the University at Albany, where he took a few business courses. He then found work on an upstate farm.

  A visit from his father changed the direction of his life. His father tasted the local cheese, judged it inferior, and urged his son to import the family's feta from Turkey. Customers liked it. So in 2002 Ulukaya opened a small wholesale feta plant of his own, called Euphrates, in Johnstown, New York. After two years it had barely broken even. He later said of that period, "It was two years of the most challenging days of my life."

  A different kind of factory, 65 miles to the west, was about to land in his lap.

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• 3. Factory and Formula

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  In the spring of 2005, a piece of junk mail advertised a fully equipped yogurt factory for sale in South Edmeston, New York. Ulukaya threw the flier away. The next day he toured the plant anyway. The factory was 84 years old, and Kraft Foods had closed it. He decided to buy it, even though his attorney and his business advisor both advised against the move. Within five months he had the financing, drawn from a Small Business Administration loan and local business-incentive grants. He called the company Agro Farma and hired a handful of the former Kraft employees.

  He did not want to copy American-style yogurt. He wanted the kind he had eaten growing up in Turkey. He hired a yogurt master from Turkey named Mustafa Dogan, and the two spent nearly two years developing a recipe. Straining yogurt demanded a commercial milk separator, a machine worth about a million dollars. The Kraft plant had none, because it had been built for American-style yogurt. Ulukaya found a used one in Wisconsin and negotiated the price down to $50,000.

  A name came to him on the trip to collect that separator. Chobani is a variation of çoban, the Turkish word for shepherd.

  The yogurt contained no preservatives. With no money for advertising, Ulukaya put his time and budget into packaging, and he chose a distinctive bowl-style cup to set the brand apart on the shelf. That cup would have to do the work that advertising could not.

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• 4. Selling Without Money

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  In October 2007, Ulukaya shipped the first Chobani order, a few hundred cases, to a grocer on Long Island. The store placed the same order again the following week.

  Slotting fees, the payments stores demand for shelf space, were beyond what a start-up could afford. So he paid stores in yogurt instead of cash. He also negotiated to settle the fees gradually, as the yogurt sold.

  Facebook and Twitter became his marketing department. Customers had begun phoning the company to say they loved Chobani, so his small team reached out to bloggers and social media users for direct, constant contact with shoppers. In-store samples let people taste a cup and buy it on the spot.

  In 2010 he built a sampling truck called the CHOmobile. It handed out free cups at festivals, parades and other family-friendly events across the U.S. In its first year, the truck gave away 150,000 full-size containers.

  Free yogurt stayed part of the playbook. In the spring of 2018, to mark ten years as a national brand, Ulukaya went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Good Morning America to announce a Chobani for every person in America.

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• 5. Scaling Up

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  BJ's and Costco began stocking Chobani in 2009. From that year through 2013, the company doubled its sales every year.

  In December 2012 Chobani opened the world's largest yogurt factory in Twin Falls, Idaho, a $450 million investment. That same year its annual sales passed $1 billion, and it became the world's leading yogurt brand.

  By 2017 Chobani held over 50% of the U.S. Greek yogurt market. It had expanded to Australia in 2011 and to Mexico in 2016. By 2021 it was exporting to China, Malaysia and Thailand.

  Ulukaya also moved beyond yogurt. In mid-2015 he became the majority investor in La Colombe Coffee Roasters. He later bought Anchor Brewing, separately from Chobani, with plans to reopen its operations.

  Twin Falls, however, had a problem that money alone could not fix, a shortage of workers.

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• 6. Pay and Purpose

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  The New York Times reported in March 2017 on Ulukaya's work with Idaho colleges to offer technical training. At Twin Falls he had created a job training program with the College of Southern Idaho and the Chobani Foundation. He also supported the Southern Idaho Children's Learning Center and the Twin Falls Rapids Soccer Club.

  Workers at the Twin Falls plant earn on average twice the minimum wage. As of spring 2021 the starting wage rose to $15 an hour. Ulukaya has argued that higher pay leads to greater corporate success.

  On the 26th of April 2016, he told employees that he would give them 10% of the shares in Chobani.

  In 2017 Chobani began offering six weeks of paid leave to new parents. The policy grew out of Ulukaya's own experience when his son was born. It covers adoption, foster care and same-sex couples.

  Mark Weinberger, the global chairman and CEO of Ernst and Young, interviewed him on the subject of purpose. Ulukaya said business leaders should build a sense of purpose into corporate culture. Companies, he said, should focus on humanity and not only on their bottom lines. In the fall of 2017 Chobani described itself as a "food-focused wellness company". In April 2019 he took the TED stage in Vancouver with a talk titled "The anti-CEO playbook".

  June 2019 brought Milk Matters, a program to support the future of dairy farming in America. It includes a collaboration with Fair Trade USA to explore the dairy industry's first standard and certification program.

  He has also criticized food makers for passing rising costs on to shoppers. In his view, businesses are happy to raise prices during inflation and slow to lower them when costs fall.

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• 7. Giving

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  From the founding of Chobani, Ulukaya has given 10% of the company's net profits to charity. In 2010 he created the Chobani Shepherd's Gift Foundation, now the Chobani Foundation, to manage that giving. Its grants have supported famine relief in Somalia and the New York City Pianos project launched by Sing for Hope.

  At least 700 million dollars was the value of the pledge Ulukaya made to give away most of his wealth to help Kurdish refugees and refugees around the world. In 2014 he pledged $2 million to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He also signed The Giving Pledge, the philanthropic initiative started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

  In September 2015, Ulukaya visited the Greek island of Lesbos to see for himself the situation of the mostly Syrian refugees there. That year he launched the Tent Foundation to help refugees. He also went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he launched new refugee initiatives and urged world and business leaders to do more. At Chobani's plants in upstate New York and Idaho, he has long hired refugees from across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

  A seat on the Special Olympics International Board of Directors came his way in 2016. In July 2017 he launched the Hamdi Ulukaya Initiative, known as HUG, to train Turkish entrepreneurs. It carries a $5 million budget over five years. After the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake he pledged $2 million to relief efforts.

  In May 2019, a school district in Warwick, Rhode Island, planned to serve only sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwiches to students with unpaid lunch debt. Critics called it "school lunch shaming". Ulukaya paid $77,000 to cover every student's outstanding balance.

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• 8. Honors and Private Life

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  In April 2014, President Barack Obama named Ulukaya an inaugural member of the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship. The initiative selected 11 business leaders to encourage entrepreneurship in the U.S. and abroad.

  Ernst & Young named him U.S. Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012 and World Entrepreneur of the Year in 2013. In 2017 Time listed him among the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Fast Company put him on its March 2017 cover under the headline "How Chobani's Hamdi Ulukaya Is Winning America's Culture War". On the 9th of April 2017-60 Minutes profiled him in a segment called "Chief of Chobani". Universities including Colgate, Albany, Pennsylvania, Boise State and Southern Methodist awarded him honorary doctorates. In 2019 Inc. magazine called him "one of the most important entrepreneurs of the past decade". In July 2022, UN Secretary General António Guterres appointed him an additional advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals.

  He has served on the Upstate Regional Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was also vice chair of the Kennedy Center's corporate fund board. He sits on the board of the Pathfinder Village Foundation, a community for people with Down syndrome, in Edmeston, New York.

  Ulukaya lives in New Berlin, New York, near Chobani's factory and headquarters in South Edmeston. In 2012, Dr. Ayşe Giray, a New York City doctor he had briefly married in the late 1990s, sued him for a 53 percent stake in the company. She claimed her family had lent him $500,000. The suit was settled for an undisclosed amount. Her accusation that he had stolen his yogurt recipe was proven unfounded and dropped.

  In 2015 he had a son, Aga, with Alida Boer. In January 2018 he married Louise Vongerichten, co-founder and president of the Food Dreams Foundation and daughter of chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

  Ulukaya is also a die-hard Fenerbahçe fan and a close friend of club president Ali Koç. As jersey and stadium name sponsor of the football A-team, he pays the club around 20 million euros a year.

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