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Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Business wars ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. It's January 2005, and in his office in Johnstown, New York, Hamdi Ulukaya is tidying his desk. He grabs a pile of unsorted papers and starts tossing unwanted items into the nearby garbage can. Ulukaya is 32 years old and a Kurdish immigrant who grew up in Turkey milking sheep on his family's farm. He moved to the United States 11 years ago and now runs a small business making feta cheese. But the feta business isn't what Ulukaya imagined it would be. It barely turns a profit, and selling a cheese that people toss on salads without a second thought doesn't exactly set his soul on fire. He flings a coffee stained pizza menu into the garbage can and glances down at the next item. It's a postcard from a real estate firm advertising a fully equipped yogurt factory. Ulukaya drops it straight in the trash bin with the rest of the junk mail and his used tea leaves. But as he continues cleaning up, the postcard lingers in his mind. Back home near the Kurdish mountains, his family made yogurt. Greek style yogurt tart, creamy and custard, thick. The kind of yogurt that's good for you. Nothing like the thin sweet glop sold in US Supermarkets. Ulukaya looks over again at the garbage can. Maybe he could no, no, no. That's ridiculous. He resumes tidying his desk, but soon his eyes drift back to that garbage can. It's as if the postcards calling him before he knows what he's doing, he's on his knees, fishing through the trash. He pulls out the now grimy postcard and reads the words again. Fully equipped Yogurt factory for sale. He stares at it for a few seconds, then calls the number on the card. Hi, I got your postcard. The one about the yogurt plant in New Berlin. I'd like to see it. Mm, yes, that time tomorrow is perfect. See you then. Ulukaya hangs up and looks at the postcard again, at the image of the factory that could give him a new purpose, introducing America to the delights of Greek yogurt. There's just one problem with the factory. He can't afford to buy it. This message comes from Betterment. Dan Egan, VP of Behavioral Finance and Investing, explains how Betterment's Tax Impact Preview tool can help you make smarter investment decisions.
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From Audible Originals I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars. When Hamdi Ulukaya pulled that Realtor's postcard out of the trash, few could imagine where that might land him. That postcard would lead him to found Chobani, the Greek yogurt empire that grabbed a massive 20% of America's multi billion dollar yogurt market and turned the industry upside down. But disrupting the market is only half the battle. The real test is what comes next when your competitors wake up, when growth hits a wall, and when staying ahead means going beyond the confines of your original brand. But that's all to come for Ulukaya. Right now it's 2005 and he's facing a problem that could snuff Chobani out before it even gets started, getting hold of the factory that his creamy dreams will be built on when he can't afford to buy it and no one thinks he should. This is Episode one Nothing But Good. It's January 2005, and Hamdi Ulukaya is driving through the leafy back roads of upstate New York. He's just visited the former Kraft yogurt factory in New Berlin, and he hasn't been able to sit still since he really, really wants this factory. He pulls over, grabs his phone, and calls the one person he trusts for business advice. His attorney, Mario Papa. Hi Hamdi, what's up? Ulukaya can barely contain himself. His words tumble out in a rush Factory new Berlin craft yogurt $700,000.
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Whoa.
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Slow down. Breathe, Hamdi. Come on, breathe. Ulukaya catches his breath and lays it all out. His visit to the factory. How Craft wants to offload it, that it's fully equipped, on sale at a bargain price, and he wants to buy it. But Papa's not sold. Hamdi, you don't have $700,000. In fact, you owe me money, if you remember. And Kraft is one of the largest food companies in the world. If they can't make it work, what makes you think you can? Ulukaya does indeed owe his attorney money. As for Kraft, well, it's decided yogurt isn't a core business. It feels it lacks a competitive advantage over market leaders Dannon and Yoplei. So it's getting out. But what doesn't make sense to Kraft does make sense to Ulukaya. He tells Papa he can make it work because he's going to make Greek style yogurt. He will give America yogurt that's healthy and free of preservatives. If people are willing to eat the watery goop currently sold in stores, they won't know what hits them once they try his family's recipe from Turkey. But Papa isn't convinced. Greek style yogurt is niche, expensive, imported and rarely seen outside specialty stores. This is a pipe dream, Hamdi. Your cheese business is barely turning a profit and you haven't paid me in six months. Ulukaya's shoulders sag. He mumbles a defeated okay and hangs up, the wind fully knocked out of his sails. But the yogurt factory won't leave his head. Ulukaya is still thinking about it a few weeks later when two salesmen from KeyBank drop by his office. KeyBank is a regional bank looking to drum up new business. They came expecting to talk to Ulukaya about his feta cheese company. But Ulukaya can't help himself. Instead of talking cheese, he tells them about the factory he can't afford and his dream of turning Greek yogurt into an everyday grocery item. The salesman offer a solution. KeyBank has partnered with the Small Business Administration, the federal agency that helps small businesses with funding, finance and mentoring. With KeyBanc's help, Hamdi writes his first ever business plan and forms a new company, agropharma Inc. He pieces together the money he needs from the Small Business Administration, two banks and a grant from the local county. And in the summer of 2005, he he buys the factory and hires a small team, four former Craft employees and a Turkish yogurt Master named Mustafa Dohan. On August 17, 2005, Ulukaya gets the keys to the factory. The whole place reeks of milk that's been sitting in the hot sun for too long. There's so much to do, he doesn't even know where to start. So he and his new colleagues take it one step at a time, starting by cleaning and painting the walls as they work. Ulukaya tells his team how he ended up here. He came to the US in the mid-90s. He didn't intend to come to America, but he definitely needed to leave Turkey. Ulukaya is Kurdish, an ethnic minority that in the 90s was the center of an often violent conflict between a Turkish government that sought to erase Kurdish identity and a Kurdish separatist movement wanting independence. Ulukaya started a newspaper calling out human rights abuses against Kurds. That landed him a night in jail and was a clear signal that he needed to leave. He thought about going to France or Germany, but then someone said America was the place to go. Ulukaya shakes his head and smiles as he remembers his response. The us, the home of capitalism and imperialism. No way. He looks around his new factory now at his new colleagues, rollers in hand, painting the walls. He giggles to himself, almost like a kid. Now he's the capitalist. In truth, Ulukaya didn't know a thing about America other than what he'd seen in movies. So he asked the guy who suggested it, what do you actually know about the place? It turned out the man had studied in the US and knew someone who could get Ulukaya into an English language school. And just like that, his new life began. He arrived in New York City with a visa and $3,000 and started learning English. One day he was given a writing assignment and he wrote about making cheese. It turns out his teacher owned a farm upstate and she and her family wanted help learning how to make cheese. Ulukaya didn't even know upstate New York existed. Ulukaya spent the next year and a half working on the farm, teaching them to make cheese while they taught him English. Then his father visited and complained about how bad the feta cheese in America was. So Ulukaya started a business importing feta from Turkey, which eventually turned into a business making it. But it's been tough. He's cried a lot. Feta cheese is a low margin product, and since it's mainly consumed as part of a salad, it's hard to get people excited about the quality of it. But Ulukaya is certain. Greek yogurt Will be different. The US yogurt market is worth $2.9 billion a year. Greek yogurt probably accounts for less than half a percent of that. The Greek brand FAI is importing its products, but sales are low. The name is hard to pronounce for many people, and the price is high. To Ulukaya, that spells untapped opportunity. In fact, he's sure that Americans will love Greek yogurt if they try it. With his factory now painted and cleaned, Ulukaya's focus shifts to the recipe. He knows he only has one shot at this. Money's too tight for his company to survive a failure. His Greek yogurt has to be perfect. He wants it to be as good as the yogurt his mother used to make back in Turkey. The best yogurt he's ever tasted. But making a great Greek yogurt at scale is no small feat. His yogurt will contain live bacterial cultures, which means it's not a static product. What might taste perfect initially can taste terrible a few weeks later. Ulukaya and his yogurt master Doan want their product to hold its taste for six weeks. And it takes them a year of testing cultures to find the right one. During that time, Ulukaya interviews shoppers and learns that many of them are mixing fruit into plain, non fat Greek yogurt themselves. They want non fat, but they also want fruit. And the only non fat Greek yogurt on sale is plain. So he decides he will give people what they want. Non fat yogurt premixed with fruit. He's also making yogurt that's much thicker than ordinary yogurt by straining out the whey, the water that's left behind after the milk has been fermented with friendly bacteria. If it takes one cup of milk to make a cup of ordinary YoGurt, it takes three or more to create the Greek style version. Now, if you or I were to make yogurt like this at home, we would need to strain it through a piece of cheesecloth over several hours to remove the whey. But that method won't work for Urukaya because he needs to do this at scale, and for that, he needs a piece of specialized equipment that the factory he bought doesn't have. The machine is called a separator, and it looks like an industrial washer dryer had a baby with an unmanned space probe. It's about the size of a car engine, and it spins at high speed to separate the milk solids from the whey. But separators are pricey. A brand new one can cost around $1 million. And Ulukaya just doesn't have that kind of money. After buying the factory, he only has around $150,000 remaining from his initial funding. So he goes online and looks for something secondhand. Finally, he finds one in Madison, Wisconsin. He flies to Chicago and drives 200 miles to see it. And when he gets there, well, he's disappointed. The separator's covered in rust. It's been stored outdoors for who knows how long. But on the plus side, it's only $50,000, and one of his employees is a maintenance technician, so he should be able to fix it. Actually, he'll have to. On the journey back from Wisconsin, Ulukaya passes the time thinking about what to name his yogurt. He wants something that reminds him of his homeland. As he drives down the interstate through rural Wisconsin, he remembers the Turkish word for shepherd, choban. He adds an I at the end for a dash of panache and lands on chobani. Ulukaya now has his factory, his separator, and his product name. Next up, the packaging. He doesn't have much of a marketing budget, so the packaging has to do the heavy lifting. He knows what happens to unknown products with little ad spend behind them. They get banished to the bottom corner of the supermarket aisle, the least desirable spot in the store. So his packaging needs to do the hard sell by catching shoppers attention. Traditional yogurt cups are tall and narrow. Chobani goes the other way, a squatter, fatter cup that mimics the serving bowls used for yogurt in Turkey. He also selects bright white plastic. Together, the shape and the plastic makes the cups look distinct from the competition. The label breaks with tradition, too. Most yogurt brands print their graphics directly onto the cups, but that process leads to dull colors and lower quality graphics. Chobani opts for printing the graphics onto plastic sleeves that slide over the cups. It's more expensive, but the result is bolder, sharper, and harder to miss. Finally, Ulukaya is ready. He's got his factory, his recipe, his separator, and distinctive packaging. But he's also running out of time. It's taken 18 months to reach this point, and he hasn't sold a single cup. He's burning through his money fast. And to make this business profitable, he needs to be selling 20,000 cases of yogurt every week. Now, everything comes down to one question. Will anyone actually buy it?
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It's 2am on an October night in 2007. Ulukaya and his team have just finished hand packing their first supermarket order 300 cases of plain vanilla, peach, strawberry and blueberry Chobani yogurt. Together, this order is worth $4,600. Cases packed, Ulukaya drives more than 200 miles to deliver them himself to a kosher grocery in the affluent village of Great Neck on the North Shore of Long Island. Ulukaya has been picky when it comes to finding stores to stock Chobani. He has one salesman, Kyle o', Brien, and he's been given strict instructions. If a grocer offers to put Chobani in the organic section instead of the regular dairy fridges, o' Brien should walk away. Ulukaya wants Chobani to be a mainstream product. He's not thinking small stores, he's thinking national chains. But first, he needs proof that Chobani sells. Lukaya spends the next week on edge. Desperate for news about Chobani's sales, Every day seems to drag. Then finally, the grocery store in Long island calls. Ulukaya can't contain himself. He can barely get the usual pleasantries out. Tell me, how did it sell? Okay, well, we've sold out, and we won another 300 cases. Sure, sure, but. But who? Who is buying it? The same people or different people? What does it matter? Well, if different people are buying it, it means they like the packaging. If it's the same people, it means they like the product and will keep buying it. Well, then, I've got good news. The same people are buying it, and they're telling their friends about it, too. It's a promising start, but 300 cases a week from one store on Long island isn't enough. To keep the lights on and recoup the cost of launching Chobani, Ulukaya needs to sell 20,000 cases a week. And to reach that goal, he needs the big stores. Ulukaya and his salesman, o', Brien, sit down to plan their next steps. Ulukaya doesn't want to limit themselves to specialty stores. He doesn't believe that quality yogurt should be an elite product. He's determined to get Chobani into big chains like Costco and Shoprite, which has more than 200 grocery stores across the northeast and mid Atlantic states. But these stores charge slot fees, meaning Chobani will have to pay to be put on the shelves. Ulukaya asks o' Brien how much a chain like Shoprite might charge in slot fees. O' Brien estimates that the supermarket will charge around $20,000 per flavor of Chobani. Ulukaya thinks that's insane. He's determined to find a way around this. One week later, Ulukaya and o' Brien are sitting across the table from shoprite's buyer at the supermarket's New Jersey headquarters. They watch as the buyer scoops another large spoonful of chobani into his mouth. Oh, this is great. Yeah, I like the packaging, too. And the price. $1.29. That's smart. Tells people this is special. Without pricing them out. Like most artisan brands. Ulukaya smiles. Sell your stock, Chobani. We'd be happy to. In every store, our slot fee is $200,000. O' Brien shoots Ulukaya. And I told you so. Look. Ulukaya turns to the buyer. Sounds great. The only problem is we don't have that kind of money. The buyer shrugs his shoulders as if to say, how's this my problem? The room Goes quiet.
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What if.
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What if we pay you in yogurt? Pay us in yogurt? Yes. You don't pay us anything until you've sold enough to earn out the slot fee. And what happens if your yogurt doesn't sell? We buy it back. Hey, I thought you said you didn't have any money. If you got no money and your yogurt doesn't sell, how am I going to recover the slot fees you owe us? Ulukaya thinks for a moment, then smiles. Then you can have our factory. Wow. All right then. If that's what you're willing to stake to get on our shelves, you got a deal. We'll stock Chobani. Ulukaya grins as they shake hands. But he's just bet his entire business on this deal. So this yogurt had better be popular. In 2009, Chobani arrives in Shoprite with little marketing spend. Instead of a splashy ad campaign, they are relying on Chobani's distinct cup to do the work for them. But what a cup it is. That bright, attractive label, the unusual shape, the combo of non fat and fruit. Something no one else is offering. A price that signals quality without whispering. Elite shoppers pick it up out of curiosity. They buy it, taste it, and come back for more. The chains reorder. Shoppers tell their friends about the new super thick yogurt they tried. Word spreads. Soon, other large grocery chains start stocking Chobani as well. Like Stop and Shop and Whole Foods. Then one day, an order lands for 25,000 cases. Ulukaya stares at it in shock. He wonders if someone added an extra zero by mistake and checks with his sales director. It's not a typo. Ulukaya asks if it's a monthly order. The sales director smiles. No. They want 25,000 cases a week. Chobani needed to sell 20,000 cases a week to break even. Now it's smashing that target with a single customer. And the momentum's just getting started. And it got there with a promotional plan entirely built around better packaging. Now, wait a minute. When things seem to be going this well, it's tempting to think you've solved the marketing problem. But what's really happening here is alignment, product price and presentation all reinforcing each other. See, the packaging didn't win on its own. It amplified everything else that was already right, from the recipe right down to the price point. But Ulukaya isn't relying entirely on his yogurt cup design. He wants to build a connection with his customers, which Is getting a lot easier to do. And Chobani's timing, that couldn't be better. In 2010, social media is going supernova. Suddenly, any company can find and talk directly to the people who are buying its products. Chobani dives in, using Facebook and Twitter to connect with customers. It responds to posts and reacts to customer stories. Ulukaya even starts stenciling his favorite customer quotes on the walls of his factory. Quotes like, life is good when chobani is in the fridge. And chobani, your yogurt warms my soul. Wow. You know, direct connection with customers used to be rare. Nowadays it's expected. But it only works if it feels real, right? Listen back to our series on Domino's versus Pizza Hut. Domino's was getting trashed until it went on social media and said, we hear you. Tell us what we need to do. Well, they listened and they made changes. And for the first time, Domino's became the world's number one in their segment. Done right, that relationship with your customers becomes an asset that competitors can't easily copy even if they had the cojones to try. Chobani's customer outreach isn't entirely online, though. It also builds a yogurt bar on wheels, which turns up at festivals and food markets to hand out free samples. They call it the cho mobile. The chomobile helps chobani tap into a consumer demographic that yogurt has long struggled to reach. Men. Its drivers keep running into the same response. Some men think yogurt is women's food. But the drivers soon learn that when they hype up greek style yogurt's high protein content, that attitude changes. Suddenly, men are more interested. The drivers hand out cups to women and watch as their husbands, boyfriends, and brothers reach over for a taste to amplify the protein message. Chobani has also started working with nutritionists, encouraging them to recommend it to their clients. Around this time, the brand adopts the tagline nothing but good. By then, chobani is already the biggest Greek yogurt brand brand on the market. And it's finally making enough money to go big on Advertising. In 2009, the company spent around $200,000 on advertising. But ulukaya's ambition is running well ahead of that. He wants to push sales as far as they can go. So by 2010, he inflates the ad budget to $13 million, a 62 times increase on the year before. But as orders from stores flood in, Chobani's factory in new Berlin is getting maxed out it's running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. To try and meet demand. Every spare corner is now used for storage. Even the bathrooms have been repurposed into a temporary office. And Ulukaya? He's running on fumes. He's working non stop, sleeping in the office, living off delivery pizza and taking Tylenol just to get through the days. His staff are right there with him, working overtime. Weekends and holidays, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's relentless. But they're all in. They can see how transformative Chobani has been for their community. As 2009 begins, Ulukaya makes his sales projections for the year. He predicts that to keep pace with demand, he needs to double production to 400,000 cases per week. But if he increases production this much, Shobani will be big enough to threaten the two largest yogurt brands in America, Yoplait and Dannon. And Ulukaya knows what that means. He likens it to kicking two large sleeping dogs. His business is at a crossroads. Stay small and he's safe. But he'll never fulfill the promise of what Chobani could be. But get bigger and those giants wake up. They'll pile into the Greek yogurt market with all the money, distribution and shelf space he doesn't have. If he wants to grow and stay competitive, he has to be ready to fight these giants. And so Ulukaya bets the house he's not going to double production. Instead, he's going to increase it fivefold to 1 million cases a week. He thinks this is the only way to take on Dannon in your play. But it's also a do or die strategy. Because if American appetites for Greek yogurt don't grow as fast as his factory's output, if demand doesn't rise to meet a million cases a week, Chobani won't just stall. It'll crash and burn.
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I'm not his sister.
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It's 2011, and Chobani is on fire. America's gone crazy for Greek yogurt. Five years earlier, it was a tiny fraction of the US Yogurt market. Now Greek yogurt accounts for a quarter of the market, and it's growing fast. The richer taste, the thick texture, the protein levels, and the health halo around it have all created a massive swell of demand. And Shobani's surfing that wave like a pro. His sales are on track to exceed a half a billion dollars a year. Chobani has come from nowhere to become the second largest seller of yogurt in the US behind only Yoplait. Chobani was already working flat out. Now the company's going into overdrive. Its factory in New Berlin is almost unrecognizable. There's still the smell of soured milk, but the air is warm and moist now, the smell of a food plant in full swing. The company's yogurt master, Mustafa Dohan, eats more than four pounds of yogurt a day while roaming the plant, tasting yogurt at various stages of production. In the vast packaging room, Chobani's brightly colored sleeves are wrapped around filled cups at a rate of 15,000 an hour. The fruit storage room is packed with enormous steel barrels of pureed blueberries and peaches, and every day 70 tankers roll up to the factory to deliver the milk it needs. By now, those big sleeping dogs of the yogurt business have woken up, and they are also going Greek Yoplait introduces yoplait Greek Dannon starts selling Greek yogurt under the name Oikos, even an ice cream brand. Ben and Jerry's jumps on the bandwagon, launching a line of frozen Greek yogurt that it claims will rock your Acropolis. Faye, Chobani's rival from Greece, is also doing well. It began exporting Yogurt to the US in 1998, but now the company is producing it stateside, too. Since then, Faye's sales have grown 66%, but neither it nor the traditional yogurt giants can match Chobani's turbocharged growth And a big part of what's fueling it is the relationship Chobani has built with with the people who love its yogurt. In 2011, Chobani turns its fans into pitch people for its real love stories TV ad campaign. The company even coins a name for its superfans. Chobani yaks. But Ulukaya isn't just looking to grow sales and profits. He wants Chobani to grow communities, too. It's July 2011, and in New Berlin, New York, Ulukaya takes his cap off to wipe the sweat from his brow. The northeast is experiencing a major heat wave, and he's standing on a brand new baseball diamond in the soon to open Chobani Champions field. As he kicks up the dry dust, he takes a moment to look around. This is what excites him. Yeah, he wants to make money. And sure, he enjoys being a CEO, but he doesn't believe in working just to maximize shareholder returns. He thinks of the anti heroes in Hollywood movies. You know, the ones who do the right thing, but unconventionally. In fact, that's how he sees himself. He's not just a CEO. In fact, he's an anti CEO. And he sees this little league baseball diamond as the proof. The local youth baseball and softball association asked if Chobani could help fix it up. They needed new dugouts and a refurbished diamond, which together would cost $15,000. Instead, Ulukaya decided Chobani would give them $300,000 for a brand new a concession stand, dugouts, and an announcer's booth. At 6pm, after a full day of children running around and practicing, Ulukaya officially opens the field by cutting a sky blue colored ribbon. The celebrations go on until dark, when the evening is capped off with fireworks. As he watches them explode into the night sky, Ulukaya realizes this is the proudest moment of his life. Not growing Chobani into a yogurt giant, not introducing millions of people to Greek yogurt, not his spiraling net worth, but opening this little league field in a small upstate New York town. But while Chobani's success allows Ulukaya to give back, the company's rapid growth is becoming a headache. The new ad campaign and social media buzz have ignited sales even further and left Chobani with a real problem. Its factory is no longer big enough to cope with demand. Even worse, it's running low on milk. Milk prices are largely controlled by the federal government. Because of this, more demand for milk doesn't automatically mean more income for farmers, which makes farmers reluctant to invest in expanding their dairy herds. And that leaves Chobani unable to source enough milk from New York State. If Chobani is going to keep satisfying America's new hunger for Greek yogurt, it's going to have to look beyond its home state. So Ulukaya goes west to Idaho and makes his biggest bet to date. $450 million big it's December 2012 and Twin Falls, Idaho is about to get a new landmark. The city is famous for its twin waterfalls, which are higher than Niagara's. But today the focus is on another super sized landmark. Ulukaya's 450 million dollar bet. Chobani's new yogurt plant. At 1 million square feet, it's the biggest yogurt factory in the world. Picture Chicago's United center or Madison Square Garden. Well, this factory, it's bigger and it will allow Chobani to go head to head with Yople and Dannon. Ulukaya and Idaho governor Bush Otter opened the site with huge grins on their faces. This feels like a match made in heaven. Chobani's factory is expected to boost the local economy by $1.3 billion. And Idaho's got milk. There are 450,000 dairy cows within a 30 mile radius of Twin Falls. Those cows will provide Chobani with one and a half million pounds of milk per day. Chobani is also delighted with the $54 million of Government Inc. Incentives it received in return for opening its plant here. In six years, Ulukaya has gone from zero to hero. He's become the champion of the Greek yogurt wave. His company is growing more like a tech startup than a food manufacturer, and he's getting to give back. At the same time, Ulukaya is on top of the world. But inside his new mega plant, a microscopic threat to his yogurt empire is already taking root. Follow Business wars on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Business wars ad free by joining Audible. From Audible Originals. This is episode one of Chobani, the Yogurt that Ate America. For Business Wars, a quick note about the recreations you've been hearing. In most cases, we can't know exactly what was said. Those scenes are dramatizations, but they are based on research. And if you'd like to know more about Chobani, we recommend the New Yorker article Just Add Sugar by Rebecca Meadow as well as episode 464 of the podcast How I Built this with Guy Raz. I'm your host David Brown. Stephanie Power of Yellowant wrote this episode. Our senior producers are Jenny Bloom and Emily Frost. Our producer is Tristan Donovan of Yellowant. Karen Lowe is our producer emeritus. Our managing producer is Desi Blalock. Research by Marina Watson Fact checking by Gabrielle Drollet Sound design by Kyle Ranch Executive producer for Audible Jenny Lauer Beckman, Head of Creative Development at Audible Kate Navin, head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louie, Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Original.