Hamdi Ulukaya

Hamdi Ulukaya (born 26 October 1972) is a Turkish billionaire businessman, activist, and philanthropist of Kurdish ethnicity based in the United States.

Ulukaya is the owner, founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Chobani, the #1-selling strained yogurt brand in the US.

He established production facilities first in upstate New York, and since then has expanded.

According to Forbes, his net worth as of October 2022 is US$2.1 billion.

Hamdi Ulukaya was born to a dairy-farming Kurdish family in 1972 in İliç, a small village in Turkey's Erzincan Province.

He had six siblings and his family owned and operated a sheep, goat, and dairy farm near the Euphrates River in İliç, Erzincan Province, 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.

After studying political science at Ankara University, in 1994 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 the inferior cheese available locally.

In 2002, he started a modest feta-cheese factory on the advice of his father.

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."

His larger success came after Ulukaya purchased a large, defunct yogurt factory in upstate New York in 2005, in a region that had been the center of a dairy and cheese industry since the mid-nineteenth century.

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 mi 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.

Chobani achieved over $1 billion in annual sales in less than five years after launch, becoming the leading yogurt brand in the U.S. by 2011.

Ernst & Young named Ulukaya as the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2013, and Inc. magazine named him one of the most important entrepreneurs of the past decade in 2019.

In July 2022, the UN Secretary General António Guterres announced him as an additional advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.

On 26 April 2016, Ulukaya announced to his employees that he would be giving them 10% of the shares in Chobani.

In an interview with CNN Money, Ulukaya said that he was very serious about Kurdish rights and left Turkey due to the Turkish state's oppression of its Kurdish minority group.