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The Chobani Experience In NYC For Greek Yogurt Lovers

Last Updated September 6, 2024 William Tang

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Greek yogurt is all the craze right now, especially in the USA.  You go to any grocery store and you’ll see the refrigerated section stacked with a multitude of options.

In these greek yogurt wars, one company in particularly has stepped up their marketing game.  That’s Chobani.  On a recent trip to NYC, I finally got to visit their Chobani SoHo Café

In This Article

The chobani café concept, the chobani soho menu, ordering and creation process, chobani yogurt we tried in soho, glass bowls to take home, advice before you go, if you love greek yogurt, you gotta go, read more new york city inspiration, travel resources for your next trip.

So everyone knows you can get greek yogurt in grocery stores but what Chobani has done is create an entire foodie experience around their yogurt.

What they do is just serve up the same Chobani you can get in your local grocery store but instead the twist is that they’ve come up with a menu of unique ways to eat your yogurt that is put together when ordered.

The idea of a yogurt bar is so brilliant yet simple at the same time.

• It creates awareness about the Chobani yogurt brand
• Creates an experience around greek yogurt which hasn’t been done before
• Basically gives you the recipes for how you can do the same thing at home

It’s not DIY like it is at a frozen yogurt store but instead you choose from a curated menu of best mixes.  Your choice comes down to whether you want something savoury or sweet.

Chobani’s “yogurt masters” have done an amazing job of creating mixes that even you’ve probably never heard about.

The yogurt also comes in two sizes: full and half.

The ordering process was pretty simple.  A waiter at the bar was taking orders on his iPad and after he punched it in and took our payment, we just waited at one of the bar tables.

Watching the “yogurt masters” (yes they actually wear white head scarfs and chef jackets) do their thing behind the glass, what astonished me was the amount of detail that they placed in the creation of each menu item.  

Each greek yogurt was delicately put together with much attention placed on the additional garnishes that are placed on top.  You can tell from the photos just how nice they turn out.  First impressions are clearly very important for Chobani.

After scanning through the menu at least 10 times, we finally made our selections and decided on:

• Peach & Almond (seasonal special)
• Fig & Walnut
• Peanut Butter & Jelly
• Hummus & Za’atar

All were delicious in their own way.  

The peach & almond was really light and refreshing with the honey really balancing out the tartness of the yogurt.  I didn’t think I’d enjoy the fig & walnut very much because I don’t usually dig figs but to be honest I was a big fan of this one.  I loved chewing into the figs and mixing it in with the yogurt and walnut.  

Quite the awesome mix.  

PB&J was a nice classic and who knew that yogurt could go well with this?  The peanuts created a nice crunch texture to everything as well.  

Lastly there was the Hummus & Za’atar which was probably my least favorite simply because of how salty it was.  

We got to the point at the end where we ran out of pita chips and had to eat it by itself  and at that point it was too overpowering.  We asked about extra pita chips as well but it would have costed extra.  

That being said, I thought it was a brilliant mix that I never would have thought about.  With everything mixed in, you could barely tell you were having greek yogurt.

In terms of other menu items, we didn’t try anything outside of the yogurts though there were a lot of people in line grabbing coffees as well.

What really completed the experience for me was how we were able to keep our glass bowls.  So not only can you enjoy the yogurt at the store but you can also bring the bowls back home to enjoy even more greek yogurt at home.

They’re so open and relaxed about the bowls too.  I wanted to have a large and small bowl to bring back home and since my friends wanted 2 bowls as well, I simply asked one of the waiters for an extra one.  He was more than happy to provide me with one.

• On the weekend it is pretty packed so be prepared to wait in line and also wait for a seat to open up.
• Don’t forget to take your bowl back home.  Trust me, they WANT you to take it away.
• Chobani offers 0% and 2% fat.  By default you’ll get the 2% but if you request it, you can get 0% as well.

If you’re a fan of greek yogurt then this is not to be missed when you head down to SoHo in New York City.  Souvenir glass bowls almost pays for itself!

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Chobani Soho

150 Prince Street, NY 10012 ( map ) 646-998-3800 choba nisoho.com

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About William Tang

William Tang is the Chief of Awesome behind the award-winning Going Awesome Places which is focused on outdoor adventure, and experiential travel. His true passion lies in telling stories, inspiring photography and videos, and writing detailed itineraries and travel guides. He is a member of Travel Media Association of Canada (TMAC), Society of American Travel Writers (SATW), Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA), and Travel Massive. He has also been featured in publications such as Reader's Digest, Entrepreneur, Men's Journal, and Haute Living. Make sure to learn more about William Tang to find out his story and how Going Awesome Places started.

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Espen @NerdNomads says

September 26, 2014 at 1:07 AM

I love greek yoghurt. It is not as popular in Norway, but on my last trip to New York I found it everywhere and in great variety. This looks like a great place to get a yoghourt fix! :)

Will Tang says

September 26, 2014 at 2:10 AM

Hey Espen, that’s too bad!! I guess the greek yogurt fad hasn’t reached up there yet eh? I have to say, it’s not that great in Canada either. We only have a few brands and they’re nowhere as good as what they have in the US.

Amanda @ MarocMama says

September 23, 2014 at 10:06 AM

What a really fun idea! I think it would be a great way to get kids to love eating yogurt too!

September 23, 2014 at 10:23 AM

I’m sure your kids would love it there :) Hope you get to visit next time you go to NYC!

September 22, 2014 at 8:46 PM

Just reading this I’m getting hungry would love me some of that yoghurt – it sounds great, super innovative

September 22, 2014 at 9:10 PM

It totally is! Make sure you head over there if you’re ever in NYC!

Franca says

September 22, 2014 at 3:19 AM

This really looks like an interesting experience indeed, if only they did a vegan version of it I’d be there right now. Do you know if they do or would?

September 22, 2014 at 3:31 AM

That’s a very good question! I know they’re yogurt itself is vegan friendly from what I understand. The fruit only mixes should be okay though no?

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Chobani Founder Hamdi Ulukaya on the Journey from Abandoned Factory to Yogurt Powerhouse

Summary .   .

Today Chobani is a global player and has more than 20% of the U.S. yogurt market. But it was a long, difficult journey (that began in an antiquated, abandoned yogurt factory in upstate New York) to get it there. CEO and founder Hamdi Ulukaya shares his thoughts on how to be a successful entrepreneur. He has always done things his own way. He wrote a piece for HBR nine years ago in which he said he was proud of the fact that Chobani didn’t have outside investors and that therefore he could run the company as he saw fit. Now Chobani is on track for an IPO, which means he’ll have plenty of new investors and outside scrutiny. Why the change? “In the early days, I wanted to have the freedom and flexibility to be able to make decisions fast and go forward,” he says. “Now we are in a place where the company is sizable, we have greater market share. Our growth is really, really good. And there’s still a long way to go. I celebrate people coming and being partners and being shareholders. It’s a perfect moment for us to be able to have others to come and join.”

Chobani founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya has a tale that practically defines the American Dream.

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How rural Chenango County became Greek yogurt capital: The story behind Chobani yogurt

• Published: Jul. 03, 2011, 10:00 a.m.
• Don Cazentre | [email protected]

In 2005, Kraft Foods decided to close its yogurt plant in South Edmeston, Chenango County. It shut down an 85-year-old dairy processing operation, threw 55 employees out of work and added a new chapter to the story of fading economic fortunes in Upstate New York.

Today, South Edmeston is the epicenter of the skyrocketing supermarket category of Greek yogurt. Since late 2007, the former Kraft plant about 60 miles southeast of Syracuse has been home to Chobani, the best-selling Greek yogurt in the United States.

The plant now has 600 employees (and growing). It sold about $500 million worth of yogurt in the past year, a 206 percent year-over-year increase. It consumes more than 2.8 million pounds of milk (enough to fill roughly 50 tanker trucks) each day. That’s helped spur a mini-resurgence in New York’s dairy industry.

Four years ago, Chobani didn’t exist. Now it’s the national market leader in a booming grocery category.

"It caught the right wave," said Michael Sansolo, a Washington, D.C.-based food industry consultant. "Consumers are always looking for food that has a different taste, a different vision, plus a health attribute. That can strike a chord. At the moment, Greek yogurt is it."

Greek yogurt, a somewhat misnamed and ancient food from the eastern Mediterranean, is thicker, denser and tangier in taste than the standard yogurt most Americans have consumed for the past few decades. Its sales grew 160 percent in the past year, compared to about 3 percent for “regular” yogurt.

“Yogurt is simple,” Chobani chief executive Hamdi Ulukaya likes to say, frequently adding the company’s marketing tagline, “Yogurt is nothing but good.”

It took less than four years for Ulukaya to build this phenomenon. He sold a few hundred cases of yogurt, to stores on Long Island, in the first few months after he launched Chobani in October 2007.

Now Chobani ships 1.2 million cases each week, to all 50 states.

Ulukaya, a native of Turkey, was making feta cheese at a plant in Johnstown, Fulton County, when he learned of the empty Kraft plant. It took him two years to put a company called Agro Farma together. He chose the brand name Chobani, which means shepherd in Greek.

His motivation, aside from making money, was simple: “I always believed the yogurt here (in the United States) wasn’t as good as in the rest of the world.”

If it were up to Ulukaya, the product he makes might be called Turkish yogurt. But Greek was the name already attached to this variety, just a niche product in the United States five years ago.

“It could be Lebanese yogurt,” Ulukaya said. “This is how it’s made in these countries, in Turkey, in Greece, in Israel.”

This product is typically called “strained” yogurt in those countries.

Making yogurt, as Ulukaya says, is simple: Active bacteria strains (the good kind) are added to milk. When they finish doing their thing — it takes about 16 hours at Chobani — you have yogurt. (Choosing the right bacteria cultures is where it can get complicated).

Greek yogurt differs from standard American varieties because the liquid whey is strained out of the raw milk, eliminating much of the lactose (a good thing for those who are intolerant of it), plus much of the carbohydrates, salt and acidity.

What's left is a yogurt that not only has more tang but also is higher in protein than standard yogurt. That's helped it become a big hit with people on diets, such as the Weight Watchers Points Plus program.

And, like all yogurt, it has the natural probiotic bacteria considered essential to good digestive health.

People in the Mediterranean, in parts of Asia and in Europe consume this yogurt throughout the day, as a snack, as a side dish, as an ingredient in more complicated foods.

Not so in the United States, where even standard yogurt was considered exotic 25 or 30 years ago.

“Five years ago, none of us talked about the need to put Greek yogurt in everything, or the tanginess, or the healthiness,” said Sansolo, the industry consultant. “Now it’s everywhere.”

Buffalo-based Tops Markets , which entered Central New York in 2010 with its purchase of local P&C stores, is a case in point.

Until about January 2010, Tops sold very little Greek yogurt, and only in the limited stores that had a “natural” food section, said Susan Durfee, the company’s dairy and frozen foods category manager. Chobani — then barely a 2-year-old company — was the first Greek yogurt to make it to Tops’ regular dairy aisle.

“It was already having unbelievable sales in the Northeast,” Durfee said. “People were reading about the health benefits, and it took off.”

Check Tops stores now, and you can’t miss the Greek yogurts, from specialists in the style like Chobani (in the regular dairy case) and Fage (in the natural section), to more recognizable brands like Dannon and Yoplait, which have added Greek varieties.

“Greek yogurt is now 10 percent of the whole yogurt category (at Tops),” Durfee said, “and we didn’t even carry it a year and a half ago.”

Sansolo said there are precedents for such rapid growth. He cites the start of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the 1970s as one.

“A couple of college drop-outs, hippies, in the middle of Vermont,” he said. “But they had a vision and a different product.”

More recently, he said, the explosive growth of pomegranate as a flavor and ingredient mirrors the Greek yogurt phenomenon. Pomegranate, also popular in Mediterranean countries, has a reputation for health (cancer-fighting antioxidants.)

“It’s that silver bullet, the patina of health,” Sansolo said. “That’s the key.”

Driving south from Route 20 on Route 8 through Chenango County’s rolling farm country, you top a hill about five miles south of the village of Leonardsville.

The Chobani plant sprawls in the distance. Tanker trucks carrying milk rumble down the bumpy rural roads and line up at the milk intake facility, adjacent to the original processing plant, a concrete block building with the construction date “1920” emblazoned at the top.

Contractors adding on to the complex scurry about, especially across the road at the ultra-modern 160,000-square-foot warehouse, which opened last winter. It can hold 2.4 million cases of yogurt. A tractor-trailer driver waits for the finished product at each of the dozen or so loading docks.

Growth has been lightning fast. The company spent $100 million on upgrades last year, Ulukaya said.

The footprint of the complex may have doubled since 2007, but that masks the true pace of the expansion.

With no time to build a new processing plant from scratch, Chobani jams modern equipment into the old facility.

A tour guide points to a cup-filling machine installed about Jan. 1. It fills 600 cups a minute. The machine it replaced filled about 270 per minute. Chobani added another fast-filler in March.

A third debuted in May.

“They probably need more,” the guide says.

Ulukaya said the rapid growth underscores one of Chobani’s biggest challenges: Finding enough milk.

The plant's primary supplier is Dairylea, a farmer-owned dairy cooperative based in DeWitt.

Dairylea CEO Greg Wickham recalls that he hadn’t paid much attention to Chobani at first.

“I thought, that’s nice, they’re going to make yogurt at the old plant and they’ll need milk,” Wickham said.

It wasn’t long before Dairylea realized something special might be happening in South Edmeston.

“We met with them and told them they needed to get us a 5-year-plan for their expected growth,” Wickham said. Chobani came up with a plan estimating they would eventually need 10 million to 20 million pounds of milk each month.

“We thought that was aggressive,” Wickham said.

Not even close.

The actual growth was “phenomenal,” Wickham said.

“So every three or four months they’re blowing through the 5-year-plan and setting a new one,” he said. “Then they blow through that and set another one.”

Almost all the milk Dairylea supplies to Chobani comes from New York, sometimes as far away as Rochester.

The rise of Chobani came at an opportune time for the state’s dairy industry.

“In the early 2000s, a number of dairy plants closed in the Northeast,” Wickham said. “The farmers were understandably concerned. It’s too expensive to ship out of state.”

Greek yogurt marked a change in fortunes. In addition to Chobani, the Greek brand Fage (pronounced FA-hay) has a New York plant, in Johnstown. Some bigger name brands make or are planning to make the product in the state, too.

In the past few years, dairy farm production in New York has been rising at about 10 percent to 12 percent per year, Wickham said.

“Almost all of that is attributable to Greek yogurt,” he said.

Until early this year, Chobani didn’t have much of an advertising campaign. It relied on word of mouth and social media.

When it did launch an advertising push, it used TV ads and new media, like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

One spot featured Stephen Wright , a student at Hamilton College, who rode his bike 80 miles to South Edmeston "just to see where my favorite yogurt is made."

Such brand loyalty is important for Greek yogurt, in part because it costs the consumer around twice as much as standard yogurt. Greek varieties sell for roughly $1.35 per 6-ounce cup, while standard American brand-name yogurts run about 80 cents per 6-ounce cup.

Ulukaya says the extra cost is built in to the way the yogurt is made. Greek yogurt demands more milk, because so much of the liquid is strained out. And there are no additives, other than the fruit in the flavored varieties.

“Some commercial places, one pound of milk comes in and three pounds of yogurt goes out,” Ulukaya said. “Here, three pounds of milk comes in and one pound of yogurt goes out.”

Sansolo said the boom in Greek yogurt is especially noteworthy because of the cost difference and the ongoing economic downturn.

“It raises the question of how can a product like this explode the way it has,” Sansolo said. “All the market factors seem to be against it. But it was a creative idea and a new offering that clearly interested a lot of people.”

Sansolo warns that companies riding this kind of boom can find themselves overextended if the hot market cools off.

“But I haven’t yet seen anything negative about Greek yogurt.”

Ulukaya doesn’t seem worried that the market for his product will bust. His concerns are the milk supply, utility costs and doing something to improve the roads in and out of South Edmeston.

Finding workers might seem to be another, in such an out-of-the-way place, but Chobani employees come from Syracuse, Utica, Binghamton and all points in between.

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Despite the issues, Ulukaya said he’s happy his vision to make a yogurt he liked took off in a tiny Upstate New York town.

“What we have here is a very open environment,” he said. “Our customers, our employees, our farmers, they are all part of the success.”

A footnote: Industry giant Kraft Foods left the yogurt business altogether about the time it closed its South Edmeston plant in 2005. In September 2010 — about three years after the launch of Chobani — it introduced a new product: Athenos Greek Yogurt.

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Chobani founder turns centuries old Greek yogurt into billion dollar craze

By Alissa Figueroa

Rock Center

One day in 2005 Hamdi Ulukaya, owner of a small feta cheese company in upstate New York, took a tour that would change his life. As he walked through the 100-year-old yogurt factory, a handful of employees were busying themselves with the work of shutting the factory down.

“On the way back, I called my attorney and I said, ‘I just saw a plant and I think I want to buy it,’” explains Ulukaya, a 40-year-old immigrant who grew up on a dairy farm in eastern Turkey. “He said, "You’re really, really crazy. That's not going to happen.’"

But Ulukaya saw something in the defunct factory that no one else did: an opportunity to bring the yogurt of his youth to the masses. So using loans of less than $1 million, some backed by the Small Business Administration, he bought the plant.

Ulukaya spent the next two years developing the recipe for Chobani yogurt.

“That place became my home,” Ulukaya told Rock Center's Harry Smith in an interview airing Thursday, Dec. 13 at 10pm/9CT on Rock Center with Brian Williams. “It was lonely days, difficult days, a lot of question marks, a lot of pressure to see if I would make it to the next day.”

No longer does Ulukaya have to worry if his company will make its next payroll.

Since launching in 2007, Chobani has grown into a $1 billion business, according to Ulukaya, with no signs of slowing down . He also did something arguably more impressive: he changed what Americans eat.

Before Chobani came along, Greek yogurt sales in America were nearly nonexistent. Now, more than a third of the yogurt we eat is Greek, and Chobani is the biggest seller.

Ulukaya's personal wealth is now valued at $1.1 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index.

Impact on the local community

The good fortune, though, is not only his. Chobani's rise has been a lifeline for one of the most economically depressed parts of the country: rural upstate New York. This area was struggling long before the recession hit, with tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs disappearing in the last few decades.

“I expected the plant to sit there vacant [after Kraft left]. I had these visions of it becoming dilapidated and falling apart,” says Maria Wilcox, one of the four remaining Kraft workers that Ulukaya hired from New Berlin, the tiny town where the plant is located. 

Growing from those first few workers, Chobani now employs more than 1,300 people in upstate New York and has made $193 million in capital investments on the old factory.

“Other companies came and looked at the plant and the surrounding area and left. [Ulukaya] always had a vision for the plant here that included the community,” says New Berlin Mayor Terry Potter.  “He’s brought a sense of rejuvenation to the community.”

Along with good-paying jobs, Chobani built New Berlin its first little league field, free of charge.

Chobani also trucks 4 million pounds of milk daily to its New Berlin factory from the area's 5,300 dairy farms. New York produced some 530 million pounds of yogurt in 2011 -- more than twice 2008 levels – and a direct result of Greek yogurt production.

A new kind of CEO

Ulukaya has been able to accomplish all of this so quickly by bypassing many of the traditional models for business success, especially in the food industry. Instead of focus groups, consultants and big marketing campaigns, Ulukaya has focused on perfecting his product based on response from consumers. Ulukaya still has messages from customers (every single one) forwarded to his cell phone daily.

The company has been particularly good at harnessing the power of positive feedback online.

“The communication is so fast; you don't need huge money for the marketing or your voice to be heard,” says Ulukaya. “It's a flat world.”

In fact, Chobani has only launched two television ad campaigns, the most recent during the 2012 London Olympics, for which they were an official sponsor. Ulukaya had to pull the ads because the factory couldn’t keep up with the increased demand.

Chobani runs on the idea that consumers’ voices will shape the market; with the internet, word of mouth is a more valuable marketing tool than ads, says Ulukaya. This helps new guys on the scene make a big impact quickly. And, he adds, it’s their responsibility to challenge the status quo.

“It's a shame what's in the supermarkets today,” says Ulukaya. “It doesn't have to have all these preservatives.  It doesn't have to have all these bad colors and stuff like that. . . It's the manufacturer's responsibility. They can make it better. They can make it nutritious, and they can make it accessible. That's what we did in Chobani.”

So what’s next for the company?

Chobani just opened its first retail store, a boutique yogurt bar in SoHo, this summer. Now customers can sit down to enjoy a “yogurt creation," with gourmet fresh toppings and, of course, Chobani.

Ulukaya is coy about what’s on the horizon for Chobani as far as new products, but he’s clear about one thing: this is only the beginning.

Editor's Note: Click here to watch Harry Smith's full report from NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams.

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Chobani teaches interns about yogurt production, dairy sustainability

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Chobani and Cornell CALS’ Nutrient Management Spear Program (NMSP) began a partnership in 2020 seeking to develop, test, and incentivize use of sustainability indicators for dairy farms. Recently, NMSP and PRO-DAIRY interns had the opportunity to tour the Chobani plant in New Berlin, New York. Read on to see what they learned about Chobani’s production process, values, community engagement efforts, and sustainability mission.

Chobani’s New Berlin plant prioritizes producing milk-based Greek-style yogurts and locally sources millions of pounds of milk per week from over 600 dairy farms. Donning personal protective equipment, Cornell CALS’ Nutrient Management Spear Program interns toured this plant on June 29, 2023 to see firsthand how yogurt is produced, from cow to cup.

Isaac Adams, Chobani training manager, and Roberta Osborne, Chobani director of farms and sustainability, led the tour. They explained the yogurt production process, from milk collection to cup assembly, quality-control checkpoints, storage, and shipment. 

“It was incredible to see the scale of production, the size of the warehouse storage, and the speed with which yogurt cups were filled,” noted Gretchen Wittmeyer, CALS agricultural sciences student and Cornell Cooperative Extension and NMSP summer intern.

The NMSP team is working to develop and incentivize use of key sustainability performance indicators for dairy farms. Their partnership with Chobani, local funding organizations, and dairy farmers in New York help the team identify practical strategies that farms can use to improve their nutrient use, mitigate their carbon footprint, and demonstrate progress.

“When Chobani approached me about working together on the dairy sustainability project, I did not hesitate to say yes,” said Quirine Ketterings , NMSP director and professor of nutrient management in the Cornell CALS Department of Animal Science.

“It has been a very productive partnership working with Roberta, our campus colleagues, and the many farmers who participate in the study. While we are continuing to evaluate opportunities for further improvements, we can now show that farmers in New York have already made great progress toward sustainability,” Ketterings said. 

Olivia Godber , research associate with NMSP and lead for the dairy sustainability project, added: “We’ve been working with Chobani for several years now, and I’ve always been impressed with their proactive yet caring approach to sustainability at the farm level. After this visit, it is clear those values continue throughout the whole production chain and with every individual involved.”

Following the tour, Domniki Demetriadou and Morgan VanAlstine of the Chobani human resources team met with the interns to discuss company culture and employment opportunities. “We have opportunities for every field here, no matter what your background is,” said Demetriadou. “We have a place for you, from those who are just starting out in the workforce with minimal education, as well as those who went to college for engineering, agriculture, business and likewise, Chobani employs people of all backgrounds,” Van Alstine added.

“Meeting with Roberta has taught me a lot about how important dairy sustainability is from the consumer and business standpoint,” said Karolyn Auer, CALS animal science student and dairy sustainability intern with NMSP this summer. 

Chobani emphasized their inclusive, community-driven culture, which is led by the company’s owner Hamdi Ulukaya. His background as an immigrant entrepreneur is a driving factor behind his diverse workforce and community engagement efforts. Chobani has given back to the New Berlin community in many ways: reinvigorating an old baseball field, contributing to the fire station, and establishing a community-building center where all individuals are welcome to participate in activities and gatherings.

“It's rewarding to partner with a company that has such a positive impact in New York,” said Agustin Olivo , NMSP Ph.D. student working on the Chobani-funded dairy sustainability project.

As student interns wrap up their summer with NMSP, the visit to the Chobani plant in New Berlin made an impression. “It was amazing to be able to see firsthand how strong the company culture is at Chobani,” said Lexi Valachovic, an information science student at Cornell. “It was refreshing and encouraging to hear of all the great management practices that are being pursued to help the environment and give back to the community.”

Madeline Hanscom is a writer for the Cornell Nutrient Management Spear Program. 

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Inside the yogurt plant: Chobani looms large in Magic Valley

The greek yogurt company has created the largest yogurt making facility in the world in twin falls, idaho. its presence there has created other food-related jobs and has left a positive mark on its community..

Chobani Plant in Twin Falls, Idaho. Photos by Vito Palmisano .

Bottles of Drink move on a conveyor to be packed into boxes via a robotic arm and sent to pallets. Chobani has a total of two filling lines for Drink at this location.

Cups of the Core yogurt being filled

Robotic arms are moving packages of Flip yogurt into boxes to be transferred to pallets and then over to cold storage.

Chobani workers are inspecting Kids Pouches on the line.

A worker moves product into the cold warehouse. The company’s cold storage room is over 299,000 square feet.

Back row, from left: Jennifer Clark, warehouse manager; Bonna Rapp, quality assurance director; Hector Yzquierdo, director of technical services; Rex Christensen, logistics manager; Brandon Danise, human resources director; Jeff Browning, plant controller. Front row, sitting, from left: Jason Blaisure, vice president of manufacturing and engineering operations; and Scott Corsetti, vice president of operations, Twin Falls.

In 2016, to accommodate its growth, Norwich, N.Y.-based Chobani invested $100 million to complete a 300,000-square-foot expansion to its manufacturing facility in Twin Falls, Idaho. Now totally 1,000,000 square feet, the plant (which opened in 2013) is said to be the largest yogurt manufacturing facility in the world. The company also has plants in South Edmeston, N.Y. and Dandenong, Australia (which supplies yogurt to that country).

I visited the plant in March. Before ever setting foot in the plant, I could see from the road that the scope and size of the facility was overwhelming. The expansive white building (with its large American flag painted on the far right side) dominates the skyline, even with the mountain view in the distance. The plant is surrounded by mostly open fields and grass, though Clif Bar & Co. is now a nearby neighbor.

As part of the expansion, the company added three production lines to manufacture Flip, its fastest growing yogurt platform; a new production line and a new bulk production line for foodservice opportunities to drive more growth in schools, hotels and airlines; and equipment for new adjacent categories like Chobani Drink. Even with all that, the company still has room to add more production lines when needed. The expansion also helped launch products to new international markets, including Mexico and Puerto Rico. 

The company can produce any of its 107 SKUs out of this location, but of everything it makes, roughly 50% is Flip, 35% is Core and 15% is Drinks. This percentage does move around from week-to-week, according to Jason Blaisure, vice president of plant operations. All Drinks and Flips that Chobani sells are made at this facility. Read more about the company and its products in our company profile .

Inside the plant

Walking through the plant, a visitor sees a lot of white walls, making the size feel even larger. The long, expansive hallways with tall ceilings were intentionally designed in a way to feature light from above and feel inviting and inclusive, according to Michael Gonda, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs. One of the halls is painted with Chobani’s timeline, from its beginnings in 2005 to 2017, featuring company facts. And in a nearby hall, a giant Chobani raspberry Greek yogurt decal half way up the wall adds a splash of color.

The production and CIP rooms all have large viewing windows for visitors and staff to see what’s going on inside, from the quieter hallway environment.  The plant was designed to help block out the noise from production areas, said Gonda.

Keeping with its inclusiveness, the company displays large TVs in various halls and in the breakrooms, which run what is called Cho-TV. The all-day programming includes employee interviews, from factory workers to corporate officers.  The company has a staff of videographers, editors and designers who come up with all the content on a regular basis. The TV is for spreading the company culture and to communicate.

“It’s a great way for people to get to know a new person,” said Gonda. The same programming runs in the South Edmeston plant.

Currently, all of the office space, conference rooms and breakrooms are in attached trailers on one end of the plant. But the company recently got the green light from Founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya to move forward with additional construction dedicated entirely to employee space. It will invest $25 million to build approximately 50,000 square feet. The new space will include first-floor employee locker rooms and cafeteria space, second-floor offices and area for support staff (like IT and HR), and a third- floor R&D center. The new space will also have a training room and gym.

The company will break ground on that expansion by the end of this year and expects it will take about nine months to complete.

Making the Greek yogurt

Every day dozens of trucks, each containing 8,000 gallons of rBST-free milk, arrive at the plant from local dairies. The company gets all of its milk from Dairy Farmers of America and about 90% of the milk is sourced within a 50-mile radius of the plant within Magic Valley. The Magic Valley region makes up eight counties in south-central Idaho, including Twin Falls, Jerome, Blaine and Cassia. 

Before any milk is unloaded the company tests it for antibiotics and temperature (it must be below 45 F). It can take about 2.5 hours to unload a truck, clean it and send it on its way.

Once tests are complete and quality is checked, the raw milk is pumped through a filter into 200,000-gallon tanks in the pasteurization room and kept at 45 degrees. The milk is stored up to 72 hours, but ideally it is used within 24 hours. Inside the tanks propellers circulate the milk to prevent the cream from separating.

The raw milk is then heated to 131 degrees and put through a separator that separates the cream from the 0.05% skim milk. The company saves some of the cream to use in its 2% and whole-milk Greek yogurts, Flips and Drinks, but most is sold to butter processors. The milk is then HTST pasteurized by heating it to an even higher temperature and filtered to remove any impurities.

The pasteurized milk is pumped to the maturation room where it begins its transformation into yogurt. The company mixes warm skim milk with its proprietary mother culture and probiotics. Once combined, the agitator is turned off and the mixture is left to mature for about 10 hours. As the pH goes down, the acid goes up, and the mixture turns into curds and whey.

Chobani uses three pounds of milk to make one cup of its Greek yogurt. The company’s straining process, which removes the excess liquid whey (separated into 1/3 curds and 2/3 whey), is said to result in a thicker, creamier yogurt. Once straining is complete, the yogurt is cooled to 60 degrees, which slows the fermentation process and prevents sour yogurt. The company sells 100% of its whey to local farmers who use it as nutrient supplement for the cows and as land-applied fertilizer.

The company’s process yields an average of 11 to 15 grams of protein per 5.3-ounce cup. In its Core line, the nonfat fruit-on-the-bottom strawberry contains 120 calories, 12 grams of protein and 15 grams of sugar.

The strained yogurt is pumped through stainless steel pipes to the second floor where it flows into filling machines. It’s here that variations of cream and/or fruit are added, which can produce more than 50 different yogurts. The company has four different domestic fruit suppliers. All have to meet Chobani’s non-GMO and ingredients guidelines.

Cups are filled with yogurt at a rate up to 40,000 per hour per line. When Dairy Foods visited, the company was making several different products at once, including Flip, Drink (the mango flavor), Tubes, Tot Pouches (which is a product specially designed for children older than six months), and several flavors of Core (like strawberry and blended coconut).

For Flip, all dry ingredients (nuts, fruit, chocolate, etc.) are sourced globally. Each is received individually and tested against quality standards. The ingredients are blended and added onto a shaking conveyor belt which maintains the proper blend of ingredients. The blended ingredients are individually proportioned and dropped into the “sidecar” of the Flip cups.

The company uses robotic machines to package the cups into cases and stack them on pallets. The pallets are moved to a conveyor belt that takes the yogurt into chill tunnels that cool the product below 45 F. Finally, the cases move to a cold warehouse, where they sit for several days, solidifying into thick Greek yogurt. Chobani’s cold warehouse is over 299,000 square feet.

From here, product will be shipped directly to customers (national grocery chains, drugstores, club and convenience stores) or to one of the other three distribution centers in Wilmington, Ill., Arlington, Ill., or Fort Worth, Texas. There is also a distribution center at the South Edmeston plant.

Keeping the yogurt safe  

The plant is Safe Quality Foods Level 3-certified and has a 2,500 square-foot lab on site. The company checks the yogurt from production lines every hour to ensure its safety and quality. With each check comes all of the required micro testing (for bacteria, pathogens, etc.).

“In conjunction with that, we’re also doing our product quality testing,” said Blaisure. This includes texture, Brix, butterfat, organoleptic and shelf-life testing.

Before a product is released it has to clear all the tests mentioned above. It also has to rest for an additional amount of time which Chobani keeps proprietary. Because of its own internal quality control demands, the challenge for the company is making sure yogurt moves fast enough from production to packaging.

“Our product has an incredibly short internal shelf life, so from the moment that our yogurt completes fermentation to the time that it has to be in a cup, [the time] is very short,” said Blaisure.  The time is measured in hours, not days.

“The most important thing is to have very solid preventative maintenance programs so that you can count on the equipment and operate efficiently,” said Blaisure. Production is planned 12 hours ahead of time, he said.

The equipment is washed on a continuous cycle (some every 24 hours, others have extended run approvals). It depends on each line and requirement. Blaisure said the vast majority of the lines are washed when an order is completed; most orders take less than 24 hours to fulfill.

The company uses a centralized CIP system. With cleaning taking place almost daily, Chobani needs to schedule all CIP in order to be able to stagger the cleanings. Cleaning effectiveness is determined with swab monitoring.

“We’ve invested in our sanitation quality team since 2013, which has helped us with not only our CIP verifications, but also our very extensive environmental monitoring program,” said Blaisure. “[With] dairy, it’s critically important that not just the equipment is clean, but that the air is clean, the walls, everything.”

As part of its quality control program, each production and CIP room has its own set of cleaning supplies which are organized by specific colors. For example, red is for raw product areas, yellow is for non-product, green is for allergen areas and white is for product contact.

Sustainability and communication

Last year the company hired Nate Shepley Streed as director of sustainability. He is working on a long-term plan to help meet the company’s sustainability goals. Currently, the company is undergoing a full energy audit, so its focus is on how to reduce electricity. Two practices are using motion sensors in rooms and changing to energy-saving LED light bulbs.

In 2015, Chobani was named Idaho Power’s “Top Energy Savings Company” for saving nearly 13 million kilowatt hours at the Twin Falls facility.

On the water side, the dairy processor is investigating new technologies for purification. Currently the company invests a lot of money into its reverse osmosis (RO) system so that it can remove a good deal of water from the whey stream. The goal is to reuse that water in the plant for its CIP systems.

“We use an RO system to treat the water, which is effective, but the challenge of that is you have 30% waste of the incoming water stream. The new technology will hopefully change that, so that it’s a zero-waste stream,” Blaisure said.

The company recycles all packaging waste that hasn’t touched product. But the challenge is what to do with packaging that’s been exposed to product, since recycling firms don’t want to touch that.

“It goes back to making sure your lines are running more efficiently so that they’re producing much less waste on the line,” Blaisure said. Chobani has decreased the pounds sent to landfill by approximately 20% since 2015.

In 2016, the company donated 259,699 cases of yogurt to local food banks and food pantries and fed community members in need.

Part of what helps the plant run efficiently is communication — from within and with its other plant.

Blaisure, who’s based in New York, oversees both the New York and Idaho locations. In 2015 he officially took over responsibility for the plant and rented a home nearby for a couple years. Last year, the company hired Scott Corsetti as vice president of operations for Twin Falls allowing Blaisure to spend more time at home.

Blaisure said there is a lot of communication between Twin Falls and South Edmeston. Every Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m. he gets on the phone with the operations teams from both plants for what is called the “Customer-First Call.” They review what’s being made where (to avoid redundancy), they talk about the distribution network, what are sales trends, any deviation from forecast, etc.

Training and its workforce

According to Blaisure, there is no defined career path for Chobani employees and that’s on purpose.

“We don’t try to create boxes for the employees. Anything that they’re interested in we encourage and get them back to the cross training, not within the department, but throughout the entire plant,” said Blaisure.

And throughout the organization, added Gonda. The company encourages employees to seize all opportunities, he said.

Equipment operators are cross-trained to run a variety of machines across the plant.

All employees go through extensive safety training when they’re first hired and the company also does monthly safety training. The safety team does some off-site training with a program called Safety Fest at the College of Southern Idaho. It also partnered with other companies to bring programs in to help with training in regards to equipment and allergens. 

The company has an on-site physical trainer, something it started doing two years ago. If someone has a stress injury they are sent to work with that trainer. Blaisure said it’s been one of the most important changes made in terms of personal safety.

“[It] cut our incident rate in half. It’s been tremendous, the improvement,” he said. To also help reduce chance of injury, the workers do stretching sessions on the line at every shift change.

The ‘Chobani effect’

Chobani’s presence in Idaho has served as a catalyst for new jobs and continues to have a significant positive economic impact in the region, according to the company. Since its arrival, unemployment has reached record-low levels at 3%, down from 7% in 2015. Around a dozen major businesses from across the country have also moved to the region, such as Clif Bar (which moved in last year), Monsanto Wheat Technology Center, Fabri-Kal and Dow.

The company works closely with the community of Twin Falls to support local initiatives. Chobani has initiated a job training program in conjunction with the College of Southern Idaho. The Chobani Foundation, the company’s charitable arm, has supported several projects, including the Twin Falls Downtown Renaissance Project, Special Olympics Idaho, the Canyon Rim Classic Soccer Tournament, numerous hunger relief agencies and veterans service organizations.

Gonda, who is also based in New York, tries to visit the Twin Falls plant once a month.

“The community is really important and I can’t do that over the phone,” Gonda said. “Establishing relationships with our public officials, our dairy farmers, you come out here. I really enjoy doing it. It’s also extremely important to our founder that we have deep ties to our community.” 

At-A-Glance

Chobani, Twin Falls, Idaho

• Interstate Milk Shippers plant 16-12. Enforcement rating of 99 (April 2017)
• Year plant opened: 2013
• Additions: 2016, added 300,000 square feet
• Size: 1,000,000+ square feet
• Acreage: 200+
• Employees: About 1,000
• Products made and formats: 5.3-ounce Core Greek yogurt (nonfat, low-fat, whole-milk), 5.3-ounce Flip (low-fat, whole-milk), Simply 100 (5.3-ounce), Tubes (2-ounce), Tots Pouches (3.5-ounce), Drink (10-ounce) 
• Total processing capacity: 40 million pounds of milk per week
• Number of shifts: 11 shifts 
• Storage silos: 8
• Number of filling lines/types: 15
• Warehouse size: 254,021 square feet of refrigerated space; 12 bays

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Sarah Kennedy is a former editor of Dairy Foods

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Chobani East Expansion

Chobani is an American brand of strained yogurt produced in the town of New Berlin, New York.

Providence was chosen to design the 13,500 SF expansion of their NY processing plant. The addition includes (10) 10,000 – 70,000 gallon tanks for raw product, ingredient mixing rooms, chemical receiving, CIP and mechanical and electrical rooms. An 80 ft. pedestrian/pipe bridge ties into an adjacent existing structure. The project was designed in coordination with Chobani’s production specialists, and constructed while interfacing with and keeping existing operations in full production during construction phase.

Location New Berlin, NY

• Additions ,
• Engineer of Record ,
• Food Facility Design , and
• New Construction
• Food Processing

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Chobani Factory Tour for a Public Relations Project – Utica Photographer

A regional grocery store chain planned a series of blog posts from their nutritionist with a farm to table focus on dairy products.

The brief provided to me for this public relations photography assignment was to document the visit by a group to a small family run dairy farm. then to follow the group for a tour of the Chobani yogurt plan in New Berlin, NY

With years as a former full time staff photojournalist, this sort of public relations photography fits very well with my skill set.  We’re often moving fast, there are many things to be documented and there usually are some restrictions that need to be followed.

In this case, there are confidential aspects to the yogurt production, so working with the management of the yogurt plant was critical.  I offered ideas and explanations quickly of what I wanted to photograph so that each shot could be approved on the spot.  By providing my experienced input and ideas, many more photos were produced from the restricted area than originally thought possible

Visit My Main Website  to see more of my work as a corporate, commercial and editorial photographer from Albany, Cooperstown, Saratoga Springs, Utica, Syracuse and Binghamton.

Contact Me  today so that we can talk about your next location photography project where I can help you as a centrally located Utica photographer.

Contact Me  today so that we can talk about your next location photography project.

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Chobani’s billionaire ceo started out as a farmer’s son with no business background. here’s how he did it.

In 2005, Hamdi Ulukaya purchased an old yogurt factory in upstate New York that had previously belonged to Kraft. Two years later his business, called Chobani, sold its first yogurt.

Today, Chobani is worth billions and has filed to go public.

The brand wouldn't be where it is today without the leadership of Ulukaya, who grew up as a farmer’s son with no business background.

His leadership style, which includes hiring refugees, ignoring language barriers, and putting people first, has been crucial for his success.

Ulukaya is the CEO, owner, founder, and chairman of Chobani. A Turkish immigrant, he came from a family of nomadic sheepherders. In a New York Times interview , he recounts going up the mountains with animal herds to make yogurt and cheese and then returning to the village in winter. What he most treasures about this time is the sense of community and safety.

Later in his life, he went to a boarding school that prepared its students to become teachers, but he never finished. Instead, he decided to go to Europe until he was approached by a stranger who suggested he go to America instead. So he decided to go to university, and by 1994 he arrived in the U.S. with $3,000 in his pocket and a small bag.

In 2002 he got his start in the American food industry following his father’s advice to begin in the feta cheese business. However, he was not happy. He thought he would go out of business every day, and it worried him. One day, he saw an ad for a fully equipped yogurt plant and got a good feeling. He called his lawyer and bought the factory.

In a recent interview with Fortune’ s Leadership Next podcast , Ulukaya explained that when he bought the factory, he realized accessing quality food was still tricky. The industry is separated into two worlds: regular and specialty. There are big brands, which are affordable but perhaps lower quality, and specialty, which are more expensive and often unrealistic for the masses.

Ulukaya had the idea to make quality food to feed to his children and sell it on the mass market. Less than five years after purchasing the yogurt factory in 2005, the company achieved over $1 billion in annual sales, according to Bloomberg. By 2011, it became the leading U.S. yogurt brand.

As CEO and founder, Ulukaya always puts people and their communities first, which builds positive relationships between the company and the people.

Ulukaya told Fortune that the CEO playbook is broken. Growing up a farmer's boy from a rural part of Turkey, he saw the ugliness of the irresponsibility of business. He describes the distance between the leaders and the community as a big crack.

Ulukaya doesn't have a traditional CEO background; he didn't go to business school and had limited experience in the business world.

But when Kraft left its factory, he saw an opportunity and took it. After buying the factory, he turned it around by working with people side by side.

When Chobani opened a new factory in Idaho in 2011, Ulukaya went to the state before breaking ground to speak with the farmers directly about what they needed from businesses, according to Worth .

In 2016, the New York Times also reported that Ulukaya surprised his full-time employees by giving them ownership stakes based on how long they had worked there. He attributes the success of Chobani to the strength of its team.

By 2019, Ulukaya's net worth was $2 billion. The same year, Inc. magazine named him one of the most important entrepreneurs of the past decade. By 2020 the company was earning $1.5 billion in annual revenue and distinguished itself as a champion of good business, according to Bloomberg .

Chobani also raised the hourly wage for employees to $15 per hour in 2020, which is more than double the federal minimum wage, according to Forbes .

Leadership style

Early on, something that distinguished Ulukaya as a leader was that he shared his authority to better empower the people around him. The difference between the people who left the yogurt plant and Ulukaya is that those who left didn't see people, whereas Ulukaya arrived because he did.

Ulukaya followed the teaching of Persian philosopher Rumi, who said that there is hope for a treasure where there is ruin. This translated into his life because while Kraft left the factory as a ruin, Ulukaya saw it as a treasure. He saw a community and people he could trust.

The CEO built Chobani on the pillars of trust and acceptance. In upstate New York, diversity was once rare in the little town where the factory is located. However, after Ulukaya arrived and created Chobani, he started hiring immigrant workers who would come to work from Utica. While all these people had different backgrounds, he believed that there wouldn't be social clashes among them and that the community would accept them.

He believes that while refugees have helped the company grow, the company has also impacted their lives, because the moment that you can stand on your own two feet and provide for your family is when you stop being a refugee. Once people get to know each other and learn from each other, they appreciate each other and what they have.

Community efforts

In 2016, Ulukaya founded the Tent Partnership for Refugees after signing the Giving Pledge to help end the global refugee crisis. The partnership is made up of around 200 multinational companies such as American Express , Airbnb , Bain & Company, Coca-Cola , Doordash , EY , FedEx , Ikea, and Twitter , who are all committed to including refugees. Member companies come from different industries such as technology, consumer goods, professional services, etc.

To date, members of the partnership have pledged to hire more than 39,000 refugees, support more than 5,000 refugee entrepreneurs, and tailor products for more than 144,000 refugee customers.

According to Worth , an estimated 30% of Chobani's workforce is made up of refugees and immigrants. The CEO has looked past language barriers. According to its website , the company has also volunteered more than 24,000 hours, donated more than 55 million of its products to feed families and communities in need, and given more than 175 grants.

Looking ahead

Today the company is the No. 1 selling strained yogurt brand in the country and has expanded into making other products like oat milk, plant-based coffee creamers, dairy, probiotic drinks, and coffee. Ulukaya wants to keep the company the way it has been, focusing on the community, the society, and the food produced, bringing healthy ingredients into people's lives.

Looking ahead, he wants to make his company have a more significant impact but keep it the way it has been. In July 2021 the company filed for an IPO on the Nasdaq as CHO. Reuters has reported that its valuation could exceed $10 billion.

Chobani has said it plans to use the proceeds of the IPO to pay debt and reorganize its corporate structure.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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At Chobani, Now It’s Not Just the Yogurt That’s Rich

By Stephanie Strom

• April 26, 2016

NEW BERLIN, N.Y. — The 2,000 full-time employees of the yogurt company Chobani were handed quite the surprise on Tuesday: an ownership stake that could make some of them millionaires.

Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish immigrant who founded Chobani in 2005, told workers at the company’s plant here in upstate New York that he would be giving them shares worth up to 10 percent of the company when it goes public or is sold.

The goal, he said, is to pass along the wealth they have helped build in the decade since the company started. Chobani is now widely considered to be worth several billion dollars.

“I’ve built something I never thought would be such a success, but I cannot think of Chobani being built without all these people,” Mr. Ulukaya said in an interview in his Manhattan office that was granted on the condition that no details of the program would be disclosed before the announcement.

“Now they’ll be working to build the company even more and building their future at the same time,” he said.

Chobani employees received the news on Tuesday morning. Each worker received a white packet; inside was information about how many Chobani shares they were given. The number of shares given to each person is based on tenure, so the longer an employee has been at the company, the bigger the stake.

Two years ago, when Chobani received a loan from TPG Capital, a private equity firm, the company’s value was estimated at $3 billion to $5 billion. At the $3 billion valuation, the average employee payout would be $150,000. The earliest employees, though, will most likely be given many more shares, possibly worth over $1 million.

Rich Lake, lead project manager, was one of the original group of five employees Mr. Ulukaya hired for the plant in New Berlin. Mr. Lake said on Tuesday that he did not expect Chobani shares to change his life much. “I’m not one for living outside my means,” he said.

Rather, he said, the shares are an acknowledgment of what he and the other employees have put into Chobani.

“It’s better than a bonus or a raise,” Mr. Lake said. “It’s the best thing because you’re getting a piece of this thing you helped build.”

The transfer of money by Mr. Ulukaya touches on a hot-button economic issue: the rapidly expanding gap in pay between executives and average workers. The United States has one of the widest pay gaps, and the topic has played a prominent role in this year’s presidential race, particularly among the Democrats.

Some other executives have also taken this issue on themselves. A founder of Gravity Payments, a Seattle-based credit-card payment processing firm, last year promised to pay a minimum wage of $70,000 to his 120-person staff within three years.

The shares given to Chobani employees are coming directly from Mr. Ulukaya. The shares can be sold if the company goes public or is bought by another business, neither of which seems imminent. Employees can hang onto the shares if they leave or retire, or the company will buy them back.

The unusual announcement comes before TPG Capital, whose $750 million loan helped bail out Chobani, can buy a stake in the company. Tension between Mr. Ulukaya and TPG about the direction of the company emerged shortly after the loan deal.

TPG has warrants to buy 20 percent or more of Chobani’s shares, depending on targets set in the original deal it struck. But that percentage would now be calculated from the 90 percent of the remaining shares, after the 10 percent given to the employees, essentially diluting TPG’s potential stake.

TPG declined to comment on Tuesday.

In addition, a year ago Mr. Ulukaya settled a lawsuit with his ex-wife, who had sought a stake in the company. The terms of the settlement were not released.

This sort of transfer of shares to employees is rare in the food industry. In one of the few notable examples, Bob Moore, the founder of Bob’s Red Mill, a grains and cereals company, handed control of the company to its employees in 2010 with the creation of an employee stock ownership program.

Technology start-ups often pay employees partly in shares to help recruit them or to compete in a company’s early days for in-demand workers. Early employees of Google and Facebook became overnight multimillionaires thanks to such compensation.

But unlike many of those tech companies, Mr. Ulukaya is giving his employees a piece of the company after its value is firmly established.

“It’s very uncommon and rare, especially in this industry, for these kinds of programs to be rolled out,” said Jessica Kennedy, a principal at Mercer, the large human resources consulting firm that worked with Chobani on the new program.

Mr. Ulukaya has played a hands-on role in the company since 2005, when he bought a defunct Kraft yogurt plant here with an $800,000 loan from the Small Business Administration. Two years later, he began selling Greek yogurt, setting off a heated competition in what had been one of the sleepier refrigerated cases in grocery stores.

Chobani pays employees above the minimum wage and offers full-time employees health benefits and other benefits. Early on, Mr. Ulukaya established a 401(k) plan for employees and pushed them to participate.

“I preached and nagged and tried to force them to do it,” he said. “Unfortunately, not all did, and I’ve continued to worry about them in retirement.”

A few years ago, though, the company ran into financial problems after spending almost half a billion dollars to build the largest yogurt processing plant in the world, a one-million-square-foot facility in Idaho. The new plant allowed the company to expand into new products, like a children’s yogurt packed in a tube and tiny cups of dessert-like yogurts.

But the company struggled to get lines up and running smoothly, and public health officials identified mold contamination in some products.

“It was a wake-up call for us,” Mr. Ulukaya said soberly. “It made me realize that I needed to get this right, and so I’m glad it happened.”

The company had to close lines and invest in improving its food safety regimens. It also took the loan from TPG Capital to help build operations better suited to the billion-dollar business Chobani had become.

In a presentation to investors, though, TPG boasted about how it had waited until the last minute to come to Chobani’s rescue with the loan, thus allowing it to negotiate better terms in a deal that it estimated could increase the company’s value to as much as $7 billion. In addition, rumors circulated that TPG wanted to replace Mr. Ulukaya with a new chief executive, which rankled him.

But in the last year or so, business has rebounded, thanks in large part to new products made at the Idaho plant.

Mr. Ulukaya will still own the vast majority of the company, though his portion will be diluted as well. He said that giving his employees a stake in the company’s success was among the terms he demanded when the deal with TPG was struck.

“To me, there are two kinds of people in this world,” he said on Tuesday. “The people who work at Chobani and the people who don’t.”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting from San Francisco.

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It’s official: Upstate NY yogurt giant Chobani files IPO that should net its employees a windfall

• Updated: Nov. 12, 2023, 8:51 p.m.
• | Published: Nov. 18, 2021, 10:49 a.m.

A Chobani employee stacks boxes of Greek yogurt at the company's plant in South Edmeston, Chenango County. Chobani, LLC

• Don Cazentre | [email protected]

Norwich, N.Y. — Upstate New York Greek yogurt giant Chobani has finally pulled the trigger on a move that should earn its employees a financial windfall.

Chobani, a privately owned  Chenango County-based yogurt company,  filed for an Initial Public Offering Wednesday with the federal Securities & Exchange Commission.

That would make Chobani a publicly traded company, trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol CHO. The estimated value of the offering could be more than $10 billion, according to Forbes and other financial news outlets .

It could also generate a huge windfall, perhaps $500 million, for the company’s employees,  who have been promised a share of the company  if or when it is sold or becomes public.

Chobani has been considering an IPO for some time, and filed preliminary paperwork in July. Prospects for the move heated up earlier this year as the company moved into the hot plant-based food sector. It also launched its latest innovation, Chobani Zero Sugar.

Wednesday’s IPO filing did not include the terms of its offering, Forbes reported. But it did show the Chobani has recorded annual net losses every year since 2016, with sales moving from $1.29 billion in 2016 to $1.4 billion in 2020, according to the Forbes report.

Yet Fortune.com noted that Chobani has had “steady growth as it continues to build on sales of its namesake yogurt brand and add newer products such as oat milk.”

Hamdi Ulukaya, an immigrant from Turkey, founded Chobani in 2005 in a former Kraft Foods yogurt plant in South Edmeston. It sold its first cup of Greek yogurt, which is thicker and tangier than standard yogurts, in 2007.

By 2011, Chobani had become  the leading U.S. maker of Greek yogurt , a booming food category that had barely existed in the American market a few years before. The company recently reported its sales are increasing at triple the rate of the rest of the Greek yogurt category.

In 2016, Ulukaya announced that he would give full-time employees shares worth nearly 10% of the value of the company’s growth between then and the time he might sell the company or take it public.

At that time, the company’s value was estimated at between $3 billion and $5 billion. That means an IPO valued at around $10 billion could create at least $5 billion in growth. Chobani’s 2,200 or so employees would then stand to earn 10% of the increased value, or close to $500 million.

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Details of how that would be shared are not known.

Chobani’s employees are split between its original operations in and around Norwich (headquarters) and South Edmeston (yogurt plant) and its second plant in Twin Falls, Idaho. The Idaho plant is the world’s largest yogurt making facility.

Don Cazentre writes for  NYup.com ,  syracuse.com  and The Post-Standard. Reach him at  [email protected] , or follow him at  NYup.com , on  Twitter  or  Facebook .

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