Hamdi Ulukaya

Chobani: bought a closed factory, built a $1.5B yogurt empire

Sam tells the Hamdi Ulukaya story: a Turkish immigrant who bought a craft food factory advertised in a newspaper in upstate New York, used his goat-milk-yogurt upbringing, and built Chobani into a ~$1.5B-in-sales company he owns ~90% of.

“started Chobani Yogurt out of there. And I think that he owns most of it. I think that he's taken on debt, but I'm pretty sure that he owns 90% of the company and it does like $1.5 billion in sales. It's probably one of the larger privately owned companies in America.”