Chobani: Reinventing to Re-disrupt the Yogurt Market?

Chobani was founded by Hamdi Ulukaya (Ulukaya), who belonged to a Kurdish family in Turkey which operated a dairy farm and also raised goats and sheep near the Euphrates River in İliç, Erzincan Province. In early 1994, Ulukaya shifted to New York to join Adelphi University. In 1997, he moved to upstate New York for a job. During this period, Ulukaya’s father paid him a visit. His father, not impressed by the cheese available locally, convinced Ulukaya to import the family’s feta cheese from Turkey. Ulukaya imported the cheese and started selling it to a distributor in New York. This proved to be a successful venture. In 2002, he opened his own small wholesale feta cheese plant called Euphrates in Johnstown, New York. Here, he made cheese out of locally available ingredients from the local sources to suit the taste of Americans. Euphrates enjoyed modest success..