Chobani
Chobani is an American food company specialising in strained yoghurt, founded in 2005 by Hamdi Ulukaya. It sells thick Greek-style yoghurt with a higher protein content than conventional yoghurt and was among the principal companies that popularised the style in the United States. It has since expanded into plant-based products including dairy-free yoghurt and oat milk, and into coffee and ready-to-eat meals.
| Chobani | |
|---|---|
| Type | Private |
| Industry | Food manufacturing |
| Founded | 2005, South Edmeston, New York |
| Founder | Hamdi Ulukaya |
| Headquarters | Norwich, New York, United States |
| Area served | United States, Australia, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Latin America |
| Key people | Hamdi Ulukaya (founder, chairman and CEO) |
| Products | Greek yoghurt, oat milk, plant-based yoghurt, coffee, nutritional shakes, ready meals |
| Subsidiaries | La Colombe Coffee Roasters, Daily Harvest |
| Website | chobani.com |
Chobani's share of the American yoghurt market rose from less than one per cent in 2007 to more than 20 per cent by 2021. It is the best-selling Greek yoghurt brand in the United States and operates the largest yoghurt manufacturing facility in the world. In April 2016 the company announced that it was giving ten per cent of its ownership to employees, and in December 2023 it entered the cold coffee market by acquiring La Colombe Coffee Roasters for 900 million dollars.
The company is unusual among American food manufacturers in the degree to which its public identity is bound to the political and social commitments of its founder, particularly the employment of refugees, which has brought both recognition and sustained hostility.
Foundation and early years
Chobani was founded by Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish businessman of Kurdish origin who emigrated to the United States in 1994. He has said that the name derives from the word çoban, meaning shepherd, rendered through the Greek chopani.
The company grew out of Ulukaya's childhood raising sheep and goats and making cheese with his family in eastern Turkey. Unimpressed by the yoghurt available in the United States, he began making strained yoghurt at his home in upstate New York, hired a yoghurt master from Turkey and developed a recipe with him, testing hundreds of formulations using different bacterial cultures at varying temperatures and fermentation durations to achieve the intended taste, texture and natural shelf life. Strained yoghurt is thicker, creamier and more acidic than conventional yoghurt, with higher protein content, because the whey is removed.
In 2005 Ulukaya bought a plant at South Edmeston, New York that Kraft Foods was closing, financing the purchase with a Small Business Administration loan. He hired several former Kraft employees and launched the brand in 2007.
The commercial judgement that distinguished Chobani from earlier attempts to sell Greek yoghurt in the United States was to place it in the main dairy aisle at a mainstream price rather than in speciality sections at a premium, and to use packaging and marketing aimed at ordinary supermarket shoppers rather than at a health-food audience.
Stop and Shop and ShopRite began stocking the product in 2009, and by the middle of that year Chobani was selling 200,000 cases a week. A decisive breakthrough followed when the warehouse clubs BJ's Wholesale Club and Costco took the brand. Ulukaya added new lines from 2010, and by that year Chobani had reached more than one billion dollars in annual sales and become the leading seller of Greek yoghurt in the United States.
Expansion
In November 2011 Chobani entered Australia through the purchase of the Victorian dairy company Bead Foods, investing 30 million dollars to expand the facility and beginning manufacture at Dandenong South in December 2012.
In 2012 it opened a second American plant at Twin Falls, Idaho, which became the largest yoghurt facility in the world, with an initial investment of 750 million dollars. The plant created approximately 7,000 jobs and unemployment in the region fell from 6.3 per cent to 2.4 per cent. The company also opened its first café in SoHo, New York City, in July 2012.
Following the Australian success, Chobani expanded distribution into Asia and Latin America in 2014, beginning with Singapore, Malaysia and Panama, and announced plans for the Caribbean. In April 2014 it agreed a 750 million dollar investment from the private equity firm TPG, funding expansion and a new product range.
New lines launched in 2014 included Chobani Oats, combining Greek yoghurt with steel-cut oats and fruit; seasonal varieties including watermelon and pink grapefruit; Chobani Indulgent, a dessert yoghurt; and a four per cent fat plain Greek yoghurt. The company entered Mexico in August 2016.
In 2017 Chobani overtook Yoplait to become the second largest manufacturer in overall yoghurt, and announced a 20 million dollar expansion of the Twin Falls plant including a 70,000 square foot facility and a global research and development centre. When the brand launched, Greek yoghurt represented less than one per cent of the American yoghurt market; by 2017 it accounted for half of all yoghurt sales, a shift in national consumption that Chobani did more than any other company to bring about.
In May 2025 the company acquired Daily Harvest, moving into ready-to-eat meals. On 16 October 2025 it announced that it had secured 650 million dollars of equity capital to expand production in New York and Idaho, funding a 500 million dollar expansion of the Idaho plant expected to increase output by nearly half, and the construction of a 1.2 billion dollar food processing plant at Rome, New York. In 2026 it broke ground on a 567 million dollar expansion of the La Colombe facility at Norton Shores, Michigan.
Products
Initial flavours were plain, vanilla, strawberry, peach and blueberry. The range has since extended to a yoghurt-based condiment, plant-based beverages made with organic oats together with milk and cream from the yoghurt-making process, four flavours of iced coffee, nutritional shakes, and probiotic yoghurts and drinks. Restaurants offering Chobani products include Tim Hortons.
The move into oat milk reflected both consumer shift away from dairy and a practical opportunity: oat drinks could be made using existing equipment and distribution, and the company could use the cream separated during yoghurt production as an ingredient rather than a by-product.
Employees and ownership
Approximately 30 per cent of Chobani's workforce consists of refugees and immigrants, recruited in substantial numbers around the Twin Falls and upstate New York plants, where resettlement agencies operate.
In April 2016 Chobani announced that it was giving ten per cent of its ownership to employees, allotting shares according to length of service, to be paid out on a flotation or sale. The arrangement was among the most substantial employee equity grants made by a privately held American manufacturer.
In October 2016 the company introduced six weeks of paid parental leave for new parents, increased to twelve weeks in 2025. In 2021 it raised wages for hourly workers, who make up about 70 per cent of its employees, from 13 dollars to at least 15 dollars an hour.
Philanthropy and sponsorship
Chobani's giving focuses on childhood nutrition, the communities around its New York and Idaho plants, and disaster relief within the United States.
In spring 2018 Ulukaya appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Good Morning America to announce that the company would mark its tenth anniversary as a national brand by giving a Chobani yoghurt to every person in America.
In November 2018 it announced a partnership with the non-profit Operation Homefront aiming to raise one million dollars for military families, donating 500,000 dollars and pledging to match up to 250,000 dollars in further donations generated by a product called Hero Batch Red, White and Blueberry Greek yoghurt, designed by military veterans working at the company.
In May 2019 Ulukaya pledged to pay the school lunch debt of all students in the Warwick school district in Rhode Island and urged other companies to act against food insecurity. In October 2019 the company launched a limited edition Farmer Batch product with a share of profits going to the American Farmland Trust.
Ulukaya founded the Tent Partnership for Refugees, which encourages businesses to employ and support displaced people, and has committed the majority of his personal wealth to refugee causes as a signatory of the Giving Pledge.
Controversies
Refugee employment and harassment
Reporting on Chobani's employment of refugees in 2016 produced calls for boycotts and death threats directed at Ulukaya and at the company. Conspiracy theories circulated alleging links between the Twin Falls plant and crime in the area.
In 2017 Chobani sued Alex Jones and InfoWars for defamation after they published false claims connecting the company's refugee employees to a sexual assault case and to an increase in tuberculosis in Twin Falls. Jones settled, removed the material and issued a retraction. The case was among the earlier instances of a company successfully compelling retraction from a conspiracy broadcaster, and preceded the much larger judgments later entered against Jones in other proceedings.
Ulukaya has continued the practice, describing it as commercially sound rather than charitable on the grounds that resettled workers are reliable and that the plants are located where labour is scarce.
Water use
In 2012 Chobani paid a fine of 130,000 dollars to the Susquehanna River Basin Commission for over-pumping millions of gallons of water over a six-year period without permits, following claims by neighbouring residents that their drinking water wells had been depleted.
The Idaho expansion announced in 2025 involved an agreement with a local water authority to draw an additional million gallons a day from the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer, requiring a company-funded booster pump station together with publicly funded pumps and motors. The aquifer is under long-term pressure from agricultural and industrial abstraction, and the arrangement drew objection from irrigators and conservation groups, who questioned both the volume and the public contribution to infrastructure serving a private plant.
Product recalls
In 2013 Chobani recalled products after mould contamination linked to a fungus, Mucor circinelloides, found in yoghurt produced at the Twin Falls plant. Consumers reported illness, and the company was criticised for initially describing the issue as a quality rather than a safety matter and for the pace of its response before the Food and Drug Administration became involved.
Financing and the abandoned flotation
The 2014 TPG investment was structured as a loan convertible into equity on terms that proved expensive, and Ulukaya repaid it in 2016 in a refinancing reported to have cost several hundred million dollars in order to retain control, after a dispute over the conversion terms.
In July 2021 Chobani filed for an initial public offering seeking a valuation above ten billion dollars, and withdrew the plan in September 2022, citing market conditions. The company had recorded five consecutive years of net losses at that point, and some investors regarded the valuation as excessive for a business competing in a category with thin margins and strong own-label competition.
Labour relations
Organising efforts at Chobani plants have been contested, and the company has generally preferred direct engagement with employees to union representation. Supporters point to the equity grant, wage increases and parental leave as evidence of good treatment; critics note that these were granted at the company's discretion rather than negotiated, and can be varied in the same way.
Health positioning
Nutritionists have periodically questioned the health claims attaching to flavoured Greek yoghurt, several varieties of which contain substantial added sugar, and to products marketed on protein content. Chobani has reformulated parts of its range to reduce sugar and offers unsweetened variants, and argues that its products compare favourably with the desserts and snacks they displace.
Leadership
Hamdi Ulukaya has been chairman and chief executive since the founding, retaining majority ownership. He has been an outspoken advocate of what he terms an anti-CEO playbook, arguing that companies owe obligations to employees and communities ahead of shareholders, a position set out in a widely viewed conference address and reflected in the employee equity grant and the refugee hiring programme.
See also
References