Hamdi Ulukaya

Hamdi Ulukaya (born 26 October 1972) is a Turkish billionaire businessman, activist, and philanthropist of Kurdish ethnicity based in the United States. Ulukaya is the owner, founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Chobani, the #1-selling strained yogurt brand in the US. He established production facilities first in upstate New York, and since then has expanded. According to Forbes, his net worth as of October 2022 is US$2.1 billion. On 26 April 2016, Ulukaya announced to his employees that he would be giving them 10% of the shares in Chobani. In an interview with CNN Money, Ulukaya said that he was very serious about Kurdish rights and left Turkey due to the Turkish state's oppression of its Kurdish minority group. In 2002, he started a modest feta-cheese factory on the advice of his father. His larger success came after Ulukaya purchased a large, defunct yogurt factory in upstate New York in 2005, in a region that had been the center of a dairy and cheese industry since the mid-nineteenth century. Chobani achieved over $1 billion in annual sales in less than five years after launch, becoming the leading yogurt brand in the U.S. by 2011. Ernst & Young named Ulukaya as the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2013, and Inc. magazine named him one of the most important entrepreneurs of the past decade in 2019. In July 2022, the UN Secretary General António Guterres announced him as an additional advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Early life and education Hamdi Ulukaya was born to a dairy-farming Kurdish family in 1972 in İliç, a small village in Turkey's Erzincan Province. He had six siblings and his family owned and operated a sheep, goat, and dairy farm near the Euphrates River in İliç, Erzincan Province, where they made cheese and yogurt. The family often led a seasonally semi-nomadic existence tending and herding their flocks. Ulukaya is uncertain of his exact birth date because he was born during one of the family's mountain treks, although he uses 26 October as his birthday.