| Biography | Hamdi Ulukaya is a Turkish-Kurdish billionaire businessman and philanthropist, based in the United States. Ulukaya is the owner, founder, chairman, and CEO of Chobani, the #1-selling strained yogurt brand in the US. According to Forbes, his net worth as of June 2019 is US$2.0 billion. In 2016, Ulukaya announced to his employees that he would be giving them 10% of the shares in Chobani.
Born to a dairy-farming family in 1972 in Erzincan, a small village in Turkey, Ulukaya immigrated as a young man to the U.S. in 1994 to study English and to take a few business courses. 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. In 2002, he started a modest feta-cheese factory on the advice of his father.
His larger success came from taking a major risk: 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. With no prior experience in the yogurt business, he has created a yogurt empire, Chobani, with facilities in several states. It 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. The popularity of his Greek-style yogurt was associated with rising interest in the protein-rich, low-fat style yogurt; Greek yogurt's market share in the U.S. rose from less than 1% in 2007 to more than 50% in 2013. The success of his yogurt empire has made Ulukaya a billionaire; he has developed new employment centers in several regions, adding to the economy of relatively rural areas. |