Chobani Began in a Yogurt Plant Kraft Threw Away

In 2005 Hamdi Ulukaya was running a small feta cheese company in upstate New York. Then a piece of mail caught his eye: an advertisement for a factory for sale. “It came in the junk mail,” he said years later.

He had grown up on a dairy farm in eastern Turkey, in a Kurdish family that made cheese, and a little yogurt, mostly from sheep’s milk. In 1994 he came to the United States to learn English, first at Adelphi University on Long Island, then in Albany. His family pressed him to go into business rather than study it. He started by importing their feta, and in 2002 opened a small feta plant of his own, Euphrates, in Johnstown, New York. It was a living, not a fortune.

The seller was Kraft Foods. It was getting out of the yogurt business, and its plant in South Edmeston, a village in a dairy region southeast of Syracuse, was being shut down. The workers were being let go. The building was old, but it still held everything needed to make yogurt.

Ulukaya went to look at it. By his account, he decided to buy it the next day.

The loan

He did not have the money. What he had was a business plan, the first he had ever written, and a banker willing to take it to the Small Business Administration, the US agency that guarantees loans to small firms.

The loan came through. Ulukaya has said the plant cost $700,000, plus about $300,000 for everything else he needed. In August 2005 he had the keys to the factory.

It was a strange purchase on paper. A man with no yogurt experience had borrowed about $1 million to buy a plant that one of the biggest food companies in the world had decided it didn’t want.

Two years in the dark

The money could buy a factory but not a product. Ulukaya hired a handful of Kraft’s former workers, five people in total at the start, and brought in a yogurt maker. Together they spent the next two years on a recipe: Greek-style strained yogurt, thicker and higher in protein than the runny, sweet yogurt most American shoppers knew.

Nothing was being sold. The loan still had to be paid.

The first Chobani went on sale in 2007, in one grocery store. Then the orders started. By 2009 big supermarket chains such as Stop & Shop and ShopRite were carrying it, followed by Costco and BJ’s.

Within about five years of launch, Chobani was selling more than $1 billion of yogurt a year. In 2012 the US Small Business Administration named it its Entrepreneurial Success of the Year.

Growing too fast

Success brought a new problem. To keep up with demand, Chobani built a second plant in Twin Falls, Idaho, which opened in 2012. It was one of the largest yogurt factories in the world, and its cost kept rising.

In 2013 Chobani recalled some of its yogurt after reports of swollen cups. The next year, short of cash for its expansion, it took a $750 million deal from the private-equity firm TPG. As part of the deal, TPG also got the right to buy a large stake in the company.

The business Ulukaya had started with a small loan now needed a very large one to keep growing.

Giving away 10%

In April 2016 Ulukaya called his staff together, first in New York, then in Idaho. Each of about 2,000 full-time employees was handed a packet.

Inside were shares. Together they were worth up to 10% of Chobani, and they came out of Ulukaya’s own stake. The longer someone had worked there, the more they got. At a valuation of $3 billion, press reports estimated the average stake at about $150,000, and more than $1 million for some of the longest-serving workers. The shares would pay out if the company was sold or went public.

“I cannot think of Chobani being built without all these people,” Ulukaya told The New York Times.

The $20 billion yogurt company

Chobani filed to go public in 2021 and then pulled the plan in 2022, citing market conditions. It stayed private, bought the coffee company La Colombe for $900 million in 2023, and kept building.

In October 2025 it raised $650 million in new equity. According to reports of the deal, the round valued Chobani at $20 billion. Bloomberg reported that its revenue rose 29% in 2025, to $3.8 billion.

The money went into milk. Chobani announced a $500 million expansion of its Idaho plant and broke ground on a $1.2 billion plant in Rome, New York, on the site of a former Air Force base. It is designed to process about 12 million pounds of milk a day and to bring more than 1,000 jobs. At full capacity, Chobani expects to buy about 6 billion pounds of New York milk a year. About 30% of Chobani’s workers are immigrants, a share Ulukaya has said he wants to grow.

Ulukaya still owns most of the company. The plant Kraft sold off in 2005 for $700,000 became the start of a business worth many thousands of times that.

What the record shows

• One company’s cast-off is another’s start. For Kraft the plant was a cost to cut. For Ulukaya it was a ready-made factory at a fraction of what it would cost to build.
• Borrow to buy something that works. The loan paid for a building and equipment that could make product, not for an idea.
• Expect a long, empty stretch. Two years passed between buying the factory and selling the first cup.
• Fast growth needs fresh money. Even a hit product needed a $750 million outside deal to fund its next plant.
• Shared ownership has a real price. The 10% Ulukaya handed his staff came out of his own pocket.

Other founders in this archive also started with what someone else didn’t want. Play-Doh began as a wallpaper cleaner nobody needed anymore. Harry Sonneborn found McDonald’s real fortune in land under its restaurants. And Spanx started with $5,000 and no outside investors at all.