Around 2007, a container of Chobani Greek yogurt appeared on a Stop & Shop shelf in the northeastern United States for the first time. Not many people paid attention. This part of the story isn’t given enough attention: the dull start in a closed Kraft Foods plant in South Edmeston, a small town in upstate New York that most people wouldn’t be able to find on a map. An immigrant from Turkey named Hamdi Ulukaya came to the United States in 1994 with little more than a desire to raise sheep. He got a loan from the Small Business Administration to buy the land. He hired some of the people Kraft had fired. After that, he began making yogurt in silence.
Rather than a typical market opportunity, he was after something else. It was a memory of the thick, sour, strained yogurt he had made with his family as a child in Turkey. It was very different from the watery, sweetened yogurts that were popular in American fridges at the time. He brought in a Turkish yogurt master, and it is said that the two of them tried hundreds of different bacterial cultures at different temperatures and fermentation times before they found the right one. It’s possible that neither of them really thought it would work on the scale that it did.
Chobani sold 200,000 cases a week by the middle of 2009. By 2010, the business was making more than a billion dollars a year. Greek yogurt, which used to be just a curiosity in the US market (less than 1% of all yogurt sales), would eventually take over half of the whole category by 2017. Chobani didn’t just ride that wave. A lot of the time, it made it happen.
It’s worth taking a break at the Twin Falls plant in Idaho, which opened in 2012. At first, $750 million was put into it to make it the biggest yogurt factory in the world. According to reports, unemployment in the area dropped from 6.3% to 2.4% as about 7,000 jobs were created around the operation. Whether you like Chobani’s products or the way it runs its business, that’s a very interesting fact about the economy for a company that didn’t exist twenty years ago.
A little over 30% of Chobani’s employees are refugees and immigrants. This is not an accident; it’s a policy that earned the company praise and, in 2016, a nasty wave of boycott calls and death threats. Ulukaya didn’t give up. In April of that same year, he told the employees that they would each get a 10% stake in the company, with the percentage given based on how long they had worked there. When that deal was made public, some of the workers who had been there the longest reportedly became millionaires. You can’t help but notice how rarely that choice is made in American business.
Since those first plain and strawberry cups, the product line has grown a lot. There are now 20 grams of protein in a serving of high-protein foods. In the Flip line, Greek yogurt is mixed with things like peanut butter cups and cookie dough. One line is called Zero Sugar, and it’s made without using any artificial sweeteners. Chobani expanded into cold coffee in December 2023 when it bought La Colombe Coffee Roasters for $900 million. This shows that Ulukaya has other plans for the company besides just making yogurt.
In October 2025, Chobani raised $650 million in new equity capital, which put the value of the business at around $20 billion and allowed the Idaho plant to increase production by 50%. Net sales should reach $3.8 billion in 2025, which is 28% more than the previous year. The company dropped plans to go public in 2022, so it’s still not clear if it will ever go public again. The fact that a man used a government loan to buy a closed dairy plant and turn it into something the American food industry is still trying to figure out is less of a question.
