Background and career
Hamdi Ulukaya (born 26 October 1972) is a Turkish billionaire businessperson, activist and philanthropist of Kurdish ethnicity based in the United States. He is the founder, owner, chair, and CEO of the strained yogurt brand Chobani. He is among the 300 richest people in the world, with a fortune of $13.7B, as of April 2026. Ulukaya, a Kurd, has stated his strong commitment to Kurdish rights, citing this as a reason for leaving Turkey due to the Turkish state's oppression of its Kurdish minority. He started a modest feta cheese factory in 2002 on his father's advice. His major success came when he purchased a large, defunct yogurt factory in upstate New York in 2005, located in a region with a history in the dairy and cheese industry since the mid-nineteenth century. Chobani achieved over $1 billion in annual sales in less than five years after its launch, becoming a leading yogurt brand in the U.S. by 2011. Ulukaya was named the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2013, and Inc. magazine named him as "one of the most important entrepreneurs of the past decade" in 2019. In July 2022, UN Secretary General António Guterres appointed him as an additional advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.
Hamdi Ulukaya was born in 1972, to a Kurdish dairy-farming family in İliç, a small village in Turkey's Erzincan. He had six siblings and his family owned and operated a sheep, goat, and dairy farm near the Euphrates River in İliç, Erzincan, where they made cheese and yogurt. The family often led a seasonally semi-nomadic existence tending and herding their flocks. Ulukaya is uncertain of his exact birth date because he was born during one of the family's mountain treks, although he uses 26 October as his birthday. While studying political science at the School of Political Science, Ankara University, Ulukaya became involved in the Kurdish-rights movement, attending demonstrations and publishing a newspaper that criticized the Turkish state's treatment of Kurds, which drew the attention of authorities. In 1994, citing a desire to escape Turkey's mistreatment of its Kurdish minority as well as to further his education, Ulukaya moved to the United States to study English at Adelphi University on Long Island, New York. In 1997, he moved upstate and transferred to the University at Albany, State University of New York where he enrolled in a few business courses. He ended up taking a job on an upstate farm. During a visit, his father persuaded Ulukaya to import the family's feta cheese from Turkey, after tasting what he perceived to be inferior cheese available locally. When the imported cheese proved popular, Ulukaya opened a small wholesale feta cheese plant of his own, called Euphrates, in Johnstown, New York in 2002. The venture was modestly successful but by the two-year mark it had just barely broken even. Ulukaya later recalled, "It was two years of the most challenging days of my life."
In the spring of 2005, Ulukaya noticed a piece of junk mail advertising a fully equipped yogurt factory for sale in South Edmeston, New York, 65 miles (105 km) west of his feta cheese factory. The 84-year-old factory had been closed by Kraft Foods. Although he initially threw the flier away, Ulukaya toured the plant the following day and decided to buy it, against the advice of his attorney and business advisor. Ulukaya financed the purchase within five months with a loan from the Small Business Administration, plus local business-incentive grants. He initially named his new company Agro Farma, and hired a handful of the former Kraft employees. Ulukaya decided to make an alternative to American-style yogurt, preferring the yogurt he grew up with in Turkey. He hired a yogurt master from Turkey, Mustafa Dogan, with whom he spent nearly two years developing his own yogurt recipe. To manufacture strained yogurt, Ulukaya needed a million-dollar commercial machine called a milk separator, which the American-style Kraft factory did not have. He found a used one in Wisconsin and negotiated to buy it for $50,000. On his trip to pick up the separator, the name "Chobani", a variation of çoban, the Turkish word for shepherd occurred to him. Ulukaya made Chobani yogurt without preservatives. Since he could not afford advertising, he invested time and money on the product's packaging, using a distinctive new bowl-style shape to differentiate the brand.
In October 2007, he shipped his first order of Chobani, a few hundred cases, to a grocer on Long Island. The store repeated the order the following week. Ulukaya's early business approach included strategies larger companies did not use. Rather than pay stores a slotting fee, which his start-up company could not afford, he paid stores in yogurt rather than in cash to stock his wares. He also negotiated to pay off the slotting fees over time as the yogurt sold. He also implemented in-store samples so customers could taste the product and purchase it immediately. Lacking the budget for traditional marketing, after hearing customers phoning in to say that they loved Chobani, Ulukaya had his small team reach out to bloggers, Facebook, and Twitter to have constant and direct communication with consumers. In 2010 he also created a sampling truck, the CHOmobile, which handed out free cups of Chobani yogurt at festivals, parades, and other family-friendly events all over the U.S. In its first year, the sample truck gave away 150,000 full-size containers of Chobani.
After BJ's and Costco began carrying Chobani in 2009, the company doubled its sales every year through 2013. In December 2012 the company opened the world's largest yogurt factory in Twin Falls, Idaho, a $450 million investment. Two additional milestones occurred in 2012: Chobani had more than $1 billion in annual sales, and it became the world's leading yogurt brand. By 2017, Chobani reached a US market share of Greek yogurt of over 50%. Chobani expanded internationally to Australia in 2011, into Mexico in 2016, and by 2021, it exported its products to China, Malaysia and Thailand. On 26 April 2016, Ulukaya announced to his employees that he would be giving them 10% of the shares in Chobani.
In mid-2015 Ulukaya became the majority investor in La Colombe Coffee Roasters.
