“I’m a shepherd and I’m a warrior.”
Hamdi Ulukaya never planned to move to America, much less start a yogurt business that would make him a billionaire. Things so easily could have been different. He might have gone into Turkish politics or the family cheese-making business, perhaps even married the hometown girl who his mother claimed would be perfect for him. He thinks about it a lot. Instead, Ulukaya got hauled in for questioning by the Turkish police one day, and his life went in another direction.
At the time, in the early 1990s, Ulukaya was studying political science at Ankara University. A Kurd who grew up raising sheep in the mountains of eastern Turkey, he had gravitated toward the contentious Kurdish-rights movement, attending demonstrations and publishing a politically minded newspaper. Though Ulukaya has always strongly disavowed violence and wasn’t involved with the extremist group the PKK, he nevertheless attracted the attention of the Turkish government, which then—as now—sometimes harshly cracked down on activists. Ulukaya knew people who had been taken by the authorities and simply never came back. Was he about to be jailed? Tortured? Killed?
More than two decades later, Ulukaya was in Twin Falls, Idaho, recalling that fraught era. The founder and CEO of the multibillion-dollar yogurt business Chobani was at the largest of his company’s three manufacturing plants, where he had assembled senior staff to go over plans for the next year and beyond. Ulukaya is a quiet man with oversize features and a subtle magnetism that’s occasionally punctured by an endearingly goofy high-pitched laugh. Unlike many CEOs, he radiates more warmth than authority, and his manner is unhurried, even when his schedule is hectic (his schedule is always hectic).
During a break from the meetings, Ulukaya had brought me to a local coffee shop, where he was drinking tea and sharing memories of his early years. Thinking back to that scary time in Turkey, when his budding Kurdish consciousness could have gotten him into serious trouble, he seemed easily transported, as if his old life never felt too far away.
Ulukaya was lucky that day in Ankara; the police let him go with a warning. But the incident left him shaken, and he knew that from then on, life in Turkey would be hazardous. He decided he had to leave. Europe, he thought, but then somebody he met suggested the United States. “I didn’t know anything about America,” Ulukaya recalled. “It didn’t connect with me at all. We thought capitalism was the reason for the suffering of poor people. The guy said, ‘Don’t be stupid, go to America.’ I looked at him and said, ‘I would never go to that capitalistic place.’ He said, ‘You think Europe is better? You go to America and try to learn English.’” The man pointed Ulukaya to a service that helped students attend school in the U.S.
Chobani CEO Ulukaya visits Centro Astalli, a refugee relief organization in Rome.
Four months later, in October 1994, Ulukaya arrived in New York City, a skinny young man with a small suitcase and $3,000 for living expenses, on his way to Long Island’s Adelphi University. He spoke almost no English. “I was extremely scared,” Ulukaya said. “I was aware that this was going to be very, very difficult. But I was excited.”
What happened next is one of the business world’s most unlikely stories: An aimless young anticapitalist immigrates to the U.S. simply because he needs a place to go, and through grit, determination, and eerie prescience about changing American tastes somehow builds a massive brand that eventually dominates the $3.6 billion Greek yogurt industry, besting international conglomerates such as Danone and General Mills. But Ulukaya has done more than that. He has begun to forge a new kind of business leadership, one that fuses competitiveness with an unusually strong sense of compassion.
In just the past year, he has launched a program to give away up to 10% of Chobani’s equity to his workers and instituted a generous six-week parental-leave policy. No unions or worker groups pressured him; he just decided on his own. He also employs more than 400 refugees, which is proving increasingly controversial in
