How Chobani Turned Greek Yogurt Into an American Refrigerator Staple

Hamdi Ulukaya needs to get some sleep. Although the 53-year-old founder and chief executive officer of Chobani LLC doesn’t appear the least bit tired when we meet at the yogurt giant’s bursting-at-the-seams headquarters in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, he’s tasked a specialist with solving why he can’t seem to get enough shuteye. He doesn’t think the problem is his seven or eight daily cups of coffee, which he takes black, despite Chobani’s many creamer flavors. (It’s a habit he picked up with his personal investment in La Colombe Coffee Roasters in 2015, before Chobani acquired it outright in 2023.) He half-blames parenthood—he has three kids 10 and under—but he told the sleep expert he thinks it’s sleep apnea. The specialist disagreed, telling him: “No, no, no: Your brain never stops. That’s why you don’t sleep.”

To those familiar with Ulukaya, his seemingly endless stores of energy align with his origin story, which reads like a textbook example of the American dream. He immigrated to the US from Turkey in 1994 at age 22 after spending a night in police custody for documenting human-rights abuses against his fellow Kurds, an ethnic minority, in a newspaper he’d founded. In 2005 he used an $800,000 loan from the US Small Business Administration to buy a yogurt plant being off-loaded by what was then Kraft Foods in upstate New York. Two years later, Chobani’s Greek yogurt made its debut.