In 1996, Hamdi Ulukaya, a twenty-five-year-old student from Turkey, was attending language school in Troy, New York. He had left home for America two years earlier. One day, his father called and announced plans to visit. In anticipation, Ulukaya shopped for the foods that his father customarily ate for breakfast: bread, olives, and feta cheese. But the only cheese that Ulukaya could find in the local supermarket was flavorless. His father, who was equally unimpressed after sampling it, made a suggestion: why not go into the cheese business and market a really good feta?
At first, Ulukaya dismissed the idea—why come all the way from Turkey to do what he could have done back home? His grandfather had raised sheep and goats in eastern Turkey, near the Euphrates, and his father had become the owner of a successful small business, manufacturing cheese and yogurt from the family’s yield and that of other local farmers. But the more Ulukaya considered the notion the more promising it appeared. The countryside around Troy was filled with excellent dairy farms—the problem was merely a matter of craft. He felt confident that he could make, and find customers for, a better feta. In any case, he wasn’t sure how else he could succeed in America, and he did not want to return to Turkey: he is a Kurd, an ethnic group that has been subjected to discrimination there.
Initially, Ulukaya imported some of his family’s cheeses and sold them to an Armenian distributor in New York City. Eventually, he opened a small factory in Johnstown, New York, where he began adapting his family’s cheese-making recipes to local sources and American tastes. He made feta using cow’s milk rather than the traditional sheep’s milk, which can be too tangy for unaccustomed palates. The cultures worked differently with cow’s milk, and a lot of tinkering was required to get the cheese right. But by 2002 the factory had produced its first pallet for sale, containing about a thousand pounds of feta.
Making the product, which Ulukaya registered under the name Euphrates, was the easy part. It was much harder to run the factory, hire the right people, handle sales and marketing, and secure wholesale buyers. Most nights, Ulukaya collapsed onto his couch soaked in whey from the factory. Sometimes he slept in a van, on the road between deliveries. After two years of ceaseless work, he began turning a profit, with loyal customers at specialty groceries and Greek diners. Euphrates’s sales rose even higher after Ulukaya introduced a packaging innovation: feta sliced into bite-size cubes.
In 2005, Ulukaya received a piece of junk mail, from a local real-estate company, advertising the sale of a yogurt-and-cheese factory that had closed down. He went to see it. The factory, which was built in 1920 and had been occupied most recently by Kraft Foods, was on a country road in New Berlin, in central New York, flanked by a biker bar on one side and a cemetery on the other. Covered in peeling paint, the factory looked derelict, but it functioned, and Ulukaya recognized that the machinery was worth more than the asking price of the entire plant—less than a million dollars.
Ulukaya had noticed that the specialty stores sold yogurt imported from Greece by an Athens-based company called Fage. It reminded him of the yogurt he had grown up with in Turkey. Fage’s product—unlike the yogurt that Kraft had made in New Berlin—was strained, its whey removed to create a thicker consistency, and it was sold without fruit or sugar mixed in. The company had devoted American customers, but its niche represented less than one per cent of the yogurt market. Fage was expensive, and its branding was terrible: consumers weren’t sure how to pronounce the name—it is FA-yeh—nor could they tell if it was a diet food or not. Ulukaya became convinced that many more people would eat strained yogurt if they could find it, reasonably priced, at ordinary supermarkets.
With a loan of eight hundred thousand dollars from the Small Business Administration, combined with grants from local economic-development organizations, Ulukaya bought the factory in New Berlin. In order to make Greek yogurt, he needed one additional piece of equipment: a yogurt separator. This machine, which looks like an industrial washer-dryer crossed with an unmanned space probe, spins at high speed to extract yogurt’s milk solids from its whey, producing a creamy white mass. A new yogurt separator costs about a million dollars, so Ulukaya looked online for a secondhand machine, and eventually found one in the inventory of a dealer in Madison, Wisconsin, who agreed to sell it for fifty thousand dollars. Ulukaya drove to Madison to pick it up, and on the way he came up with a brand name for his yogurt: Chobani, which derives from çoban, the Turkish word for shepherd.
It took Ulukaya two years of experimentation to get the consistency and flavor right—creamy, and not too tart—and to design the colorful cups in which the yogurt was to be sold, in plain, vanilla, strawberry, peach, and blueberry flavors. (The fruit, he decided, would be on the bottom.) Ulukaya then began working to get his product on grocery shelves. He largely ignored specialty retailers and focussed instead on forging relationships with mass-market retailers like ShopRite. When he couldn’t afford the supermarket’s fees for shelf space, he bartered yogurt in exchange.
Five years after Chobani was launched, the company has reached a billion dollars in revenue: a growth rate more typical of a successful tech start-up than a food business. More than thirty per cent of the yogurt eaten in America is now Greek yogurt, and much of it is being made by Chobani in the New Berlin factory (which has been greatly expanded) and in a new facility in Twin Falls, Idaho. With his modest cheese business, Ulukaya made a specialty product for specialized consumers: people who had already acquired the taste for feta. With Chobani, Ulukaya has transformed a product with a distinctly ethnic identity into an entirely American product—and this kind of transformation is the most American story there is.
Yogurt is made by adding live cultures to fresh milk that has been heated, then permitting the cultures to ferment until the mixture thickens and becomes tangy. Like cheese, yogurt is a primitive processed food, a way of preserving milk beyond its natural life span. Long part of European, Middle Eastern, and Indian cuisine, it is relatively new to the American diet. In 1922, Bertha M. Wood published the cookbook “Foods of the Foreign-Born,” which described to American readers the exotic dish of yogurt, or matzoun, a lunchtime staple among residents of Turkey, Greece, Armenia, and Syria, and typically prepared at home. “It is as valuable in their diet as buttermilk is in ours,” Wood wrote. Unfortunately, her recipe called for stirring into milk a tablespoon of “old matzoun,” which posed a challenge for cooks without a friendly Turkish or Syrian neighbor.
The industrial production of yogurt began in Europe. In 1919, Isaac Carasso, an entrepreneur in Barcelona, founded Danone, which eventually supplied most of the Continent. His son, Daniel Carasso, immigrated to the U.S., and in 1942 he set up shop in the Bronx, under the name Dannon, and began selling plain yogurt. That year, the Times ran an article about this obscure new foodstuff, which, it explained, could be eaten with salted crackers and a green salad, spooned over steamed rice or boiled vegetables, or mixed with strawberry jam and spread on wheat bread.
By the late forties, manufacturers had begun adding fruit preserves to the bottom of the yogurt container. In 1953, Dannon invented vanilla yogurt, and announced that its product had been “completely Americanized.” A decade or so later came “Swiss-style” yogurt, in which fruit flavoring was evenly distributed, with the help of additives such as gelatin or pectin; artificial colors guaranteed that the product would have a pleasant pastel look. Manufacturers also began adding potassium sorbate, a preservative, to extend yogurt’s shelf life.
Yogurt was reaching a mass consumer base by the mid-seventies, with marketing campaigns touting it as a health food. Several TV spots made by Dannon celebrated the yogurt-based diets of centenarian Georgians, who were seen cheerfully hoeing or chopping wood. At the same time, yogurt was marketed to women as a diet product, with advertisements for low-fat varieties featuring models in bikinis. This health-enhancing reputation helped launch the market for frozen yogurt: New York reported that when Dannon opened its first storefront, on the Upper East Side, in 1975, customers outnumbered those at a nearby Häagen-Dazs outlet by a ratio of three to one.
Frozen yogurt, which promises an elusive combination of healthfulness and indulgence, follows a familiar pattern. The nineteen-eighties saw an enthusiasm for cholesterol-reducing oat bran, delivered in the form of giant chocolate-chip muffins; in the nineteen-nineties, dieters turned to low-fat regimens, and manufacturers responded by producing treats like SnackWells cookies, which compensated for the absence of fat with extra sugar. In America, yogurt, too, has tilted in the direction of dessert. The nutritionist Marion Nestle, in her 2006 book, “What to Eat,” noted that yogurt had become available in such flavors as piña colada, cotton candy, and cheesecake, and was often being sold with swirls of candy sprinkles or Oreo bits. A raspberry variety of Yoplait’s Go-Gurt—packaged in tubes, for kids—was colored electric blue. The closer that yogurt has come to resemble junk food, the faster consumption has grown: by 2005, the average American was eating about ten pints of yogurt a year, five times the consumption of 1980. “Yogurt, it seems, has performed a marketing miracle,” Nestle concluded. “It is a fast-selling dairy dessert with the aura of a health food.”
Nestle’s book was published before the explosion of Greek yogurt, which has a higher protein content than other yogurts. There are between thirteen and eighteen grams of protein in each Chobani cup, and little or no fat—a selling point at a moment when high-protein diets have achieved widespread popularity. Nevertheless, Chobani is as dessert-like as its mass-market predecessors: there are twenty grams of sugar in a six-ounce container of blueberry, its most popular flavor; some of the sweetness derives from the fruit and milk solids, but much of it is from cane sugar.
Chobani’s rapid success has left the established yogurt companies trying to catch up. In 2011, Dannon began selling a line of Greek yogurts under the brand name Oikos—the word means “house”—and more recently it has begun producing Greek-yogurt-based dips, in such savory flavors as cucumber-dill and roasted red pepper. Yoplait is offering Greek 100, a hundred-calorie cup endorsed by Weight Watchers. Ben & Jerry’s now manufactures frozen Greek yogurt in seven flavors, including banana peanut butter and strawberry shortcake. (“We think it’ll rock your Acropolis!”) Chobani is not about to be outdone: some of its newest offerings feature white- or dark-chocolate chips.
The biker bar that once stood adjacent to Chobani’s New Berlin factory is gone. In its stead is a giant warehouse that can hold a week’s production of yogurt: up to two million cases, made from about twenty-eight million pounds of milk. Seventy tankers of milk arrive at the plant every day, which means that the country roads surrounding the factory are far less quiet than they used to be. But the plant has also brought hundreds of new jobs to the region, and Chobani recently spent three hundred thousand dollars building a local Little League field.
I visited New Berlin in August, and was shown around the factory by Dave Christensen, a Chobani executive. Inside the chilled, hangar-like warehouse, cases of yogurt destined for the shelves of Costco were being packed in special branded boxes. In the vast packaging room, Chobani’s familiar brightly colored sleeves were being wrapped around filled plastic cups of yogurt, at a rate of thirty thousand cups an hour. A fruit-storage room held enormous steel barrels equipped at the bottom with large spigots, from which puréed blueberries, strawberries, and mangoes could be tapped. In the older wing of the factory, Christensen led me into what is known as Filler Alley. I watched through glass as a sleekly moving steel machine squirted what looked like blueberry compote into the bottom of half a dozen cups at a time. Then a different set of nozzles squeezed blobs of plain yogurt onto each serving of fruit, so that the contents of each container were topped with a perfect creamy peak, like soft-serve ice cream that has yet to be licked.
In another room, plastic cartons were being filled with yogurt mixed with chocolate chips. The cartons were on their way to becoming Raspberry Choco Fix Flips. The Flip is among Chobani’s latest innovations: flavored yogurt paired with a punnet of fruit or dry ingredients. Upstairs, we entered the separator room, where regular yogurt is spun into Greek yogurt by more than a dozen separators. Dozens of pipes ran along the walls and ceilings, entering and exiting tanks and machines with Seussian complexity. The air was warm and moist and pungent with the scent of soured milk, like the cleavage of a nursing mother on a warm day. The yogurt was piped in here from another room, which was off-limits to visitors. The milk, Christensen explained, was inoculated with five live cultures, following a formula that had been devised by Mustafa Dogan, a food chemist Ulukaya brought in from Turkey. “The yogurt decides when it’s ready,” Christensen added, adopting a strangely mystical air for a man who, before coming to work for Chobani, used to run an airplane factory.
In New Berlin, Ulukaya has an almost cultlike aura; employees invariably refer to him by his first name. Christensen praised his boss’s generosity, noting that last summer Ulukaya took Chobani’s first five employees to London for the Olympics. (Chobani was a sponsor.) Every Thanksgiving, Christensen added, Ulukaya gives each employee a turkey and a bucket of feta. Christensen told me that, last December, employees at the factory had learned they would be expected to work on Christmas Day, to fulfill orders. This could have spoiled the employees’ festive season, but Ulukaya brought in a prime-rib dinner for everyone, as compensation for their lost holiday.
Ulukaya is indeed charismatic, as I discovered when I joined him for lunch, at his nearby home. He is a handsome man of forty-one with thick dark hair, olive skin, and a riveting capacity for eye contact. His manner is casual and intimate, and his chuckle so ready that it can seem to border on the hysterical. He lives in a luxurious, but not showy, contemporary house on the crest of a hill. In the open-plan living-dining room, a fireplace was set into a drystone wall; the ceiling featured reclaimed vintage beams. Beyond sliding glass doors, a deck gave onto a wide lawn with a freshwater pond. The property is surrounded by gentle hills, and a state forest rambles extensively behind Ulukaya’s barn, which he uses as a private movie theatre. On a clear day, the Catskills can be glimpsed in the distance. “I think you can see fifty miles,” Ulukaya told me. “The only limit is your sight.”
In the kitchen, he made espresso, fumbling slightly with the machine, as if he had rarely operated it. After pizza was delivered, from a local restaurant, he poured a glass of Gavi for me and offered me slices of his preferred feta cheese, which was imported from Turkey and is made from sheep’s milk. Discreetly placed speakers played music that was quite possibly Turkish, or Greek. On the dining table was a pile of books: Rumi, Neruda, Lorca. “I’m a big Rumi guy,” he told me. The books were a recent acquisition from the McNally Jackson bookstore, in SoHo, which is around the block from Chobani’s New York office. Nearby, on West Broadway, is the first Chobani café, which opened last year and sells concoctions of plain, low-fat yogurt topped with mango, avocado, jalapeño, and cilantro, or yogurt with pistachio, honey, dark chocolate, and orange. The café serves as a research lab: if a recipe proves popular, it can be adapted for mass-market production, with an inevitable diminution in flavor and subtlety. (The yogurt I ate there last summer—topped with peach, almonds, thyme, and lemon zest—was inspired. The blended-peach and pistachio Flip is more ordinary.)
Ulukaya wore jeans and a blue denim shirt that bore an embroidered Chobani crest over the left pocket, which made him look a bit like a server at the Chobani café, rather than like a billionaire entrepreneur. Ulukaya is unmarried. His ex-wife, a doctor named Ayse Giray, to whom he was briefly married in the late nineties, is suing him, alleging that she provided funding to Ulukaya’s business during and after their marriage, and is therefore owed a fifty-three-per-cent stake in Chobani. Ulukaya told me that he expects the case to be over soon, adding that he isn’t worried about the impact of its resolution upon his company. “One good thing about this country is that anybody can sue anybody, anytime,” he said, merrily.
Ulukaya described his origins in rural Turkey, where, he said, his family had been seminomadic. “They would go up into the mountains with their sheep and goats,” he said. “They would start in the early spring, and as the summer came they would go further and further and further up, so by the time they reached the top it was time to come back down again.” He doesn’t know his exact date of birth, he told me, because he was born while his mother was coming back down a mountain, rather than in the local hospital. “My early life, and living here, I feel like I travelled a thousand years,” he said. He told me that the landscape of upstate New York reminded him of his home in Turkey; when pressed, he acknowledged that there were fewer trees there, and less lush pasture.
Ulukaya is transforming the upstate landscape, at least in terms of its dairy industry. Since Chobani’s arrival in New Berlin, its original competitor, Fage, has opened a plant in Johnstown; the state is also home to Siggi’s—an Icelandic-style yogurt, made with skim milk, that is strained and less sweet than most commercial brands—and Müller, a German brand that is teaming with PepsiCo to expand in the U.S. In the summer of 2012, Governor Andrew Cuomo convened a Yogurt Summit in Albany, to explore ways that the state could capitalize on its position as the prime producer of newfangled yogurt. “Our cows are working overtime,” State Senator James Seward boasted to the assembled lawmakers and industry representatives.
After the summit, Cuomo moved to deregulate the state’s oversight of dairy farms with between two hundred and three hundred head of cattle. In July, the state was sued by Riverkeeper, the environmental group, which asserts that deregulation will harm New York’s water supply. The suit also raised alarm about Greek yogurt’s chief by-product, whey—an acidic mixture, containing nitrogen and phosphorous, that is commonly disposed of by being added to cattle feed and fertilizer or treated in a digester, which breaks down the whey, producing methane gas that can be harnessed for energy. Neither process eliminates the potential danger to soil or water, Riverkeeper maintains. Ulukaya noted that Chobani is exploring the possibility of building its own digester in New Berlin, which would obviate the need to transport whey elsewhere for disposal. But he argued that Riverkeeper has exaggerated the dangers of yogurt processing. “There is no whey that has gone into the rivers and is killing the fishes,” he told me. “That shit is not happening. If I know that anytime I make business it will damage one tree, one fish, one thing, I will not even make one cup.”
Ulukaya delivered a well-practiced account of why he had been able to bring the tastes of Turkey and Greece to New York and beyond. His success rested upon not underestimating the taste, or the intelligence, of the average American consumer. “We say it has to be delicious, and it has to be nutritious,” he said. “Yogurt should be something that you can reach in the fridge and eat at any given day, any given time, without feeling guilty.” Before Chobani, he told me, Americans ate yogurt filled with coloring and stabilizers and preservatives and sugars not because they preferred them but because alternatives weren’t readily available. “The big brands clearly knew how to make good yogurt,” he said. “They were making it in France, or in Turkey. Why wouldn’t they do it here? The answer they would give is that the Americans wouldn’t appreciate it—that Americans would not like a yogurt unless it was overly sweetened, to get rid of the yogurt taste. One would wonder if manufacturers truly believed that story, and that’s why they made a product that is full of sugars and colors and other ingredients. Or maybe it was cheaper to do it that way, so they wanted to believe that story.”
Earlier this year, Chobani launched an advertising campaign with the slogan “Go Real,” touting the company’s use of natural ingredients. Since the F.D.A. does not define “natural,” exactly what the term means is a matter of interpretation. According to some critics, the “Go Real” campaign falsely implies that Chobani’s yogurts contain no added sugar (they do); that they have no artificial colors (they have dyes derived from beets and other foodstuffs); that they do not contain thickening agents (the fruit flavors contain pectin or locust-bean gum); that the company uses organic milk (it doesn’t); and that cows supplying milk to Chobani are not fed genetically modified grain (they often are). Ulukaya is proud that he has dissuaded farmers who supply his milk from using rBST, a synthetic hormone that elevates milk production; it is banned in Europe but approved by the F.D.A. Yet he is pragmatic about how natural he can afford to be. “You could argue that you want more—of course you do,” he said. “We all do. But when we do it we want to make sure that everyday people can have access to it.” At FreshDirect, a single-serving container of Chobani blueberry yogurt costs a dollar twenty-nine, forty cents less than Oikos organic Greek yogurt.
Ulukaya spoke at length about his decision not to use potassium sorbate, a preservative widely used in dairy products, and about the challenges of manufacturing a product that contains live bacteria. “Preservatives are an awful thing,” he said. “One of the worst things I see on labels—I can’t believe it says this—is that it lists the preservative and says ‘to maintain freshness.’ Are you freaking kidding me? They put these ingredients next to the ‘freshness’ word, and this evil becomes something to help you, by keeping our product fresh. But it’s a chemical that ends up in my gut, creating many problems.” Some scientific studies have suggested that eating yogurt with live bacteria can promote a healthy digestive tract. Forgoing preservatives, Ulukaya said, “is very difficult to do. It’s risky. If you put that ingredient in, you sleep better. You can open that yogurt cup and put it on your table and it can stay for days and days and days, and nothing will grow in there. People think that’s a good thing—but that’s a horrible thing. It means it is not alive.”
A month or so after my visit, Ulukaya had reason to lose a lot of sleep: consumers began complaining of containers with bloated lids and yogurt that tasted effervescent. Within days, Chobani issued a recall, citing mold contamination in its Idaho plant, which accounts for a third of Chobani’s over-all production. (The company refused to disclose the size of the recall.) Ultimately, the F.D.A. received more than two hundred complaints from consumers who had experienced stomach cramps, nausea, or vomiting after eating Chobani yogurt; perhaps predictably, a suit has been filed against the company. Chobani issued a statement explaining that the mold in question commonly occurs in dairy environments, and in most cases poses no significant threat to health. “We have done testing, and found that this is an issue of food quality and not food safety,” Nicki Briggs, the company’s chief publicist, told me.
Before the recall, Ulukaya had garnered almost universally laudatory press, and the company’s controversies, such as they were, sometimes seemed ginned up by clever public-relations specialists. (In August, Chobani was in the news because its Blueberry Power Flip had been banned by the Air Force, for fear that the hemp seeds it contained might interfere with drug testing; this is the kind of coolness-bestowing story that marketing money can’t buy.) But when the recall happened, Briggs told me, Ulukaya was “heartbroken,” adding, “Companies go through recalls all the time, but this was a first for us.” Since the recall, Chobani has announced that it is giving Cornell’s food-science department a million and a half dollars, which will fund research into food safety and training protocols for dairy workers.
Last August, I went with my family to Greece for the first time, and before I went I sought the advice of Diane Kochilas, the author of “The Country Cooking of Greece,” about how to experience yogurt as the Greeks eat it. Without hesitation, Kochilas told me that the best yogurt she had ever tasted came from the dairy of a small producer outside the town of Argos, in the Peloponnese. Several weeks later, my husband, my son, and I were driving along a narrow country road through the arid hills of the Argolid, reverently considering the legacy of Agamemnon and scouring the roadside for a sign indicating that we had reached the dairy, Galaktokomika Karyas.
Eventually, we pulled up a driveway leading to a low, windowless building the size of a gas station. Theodosius Mavrogiannis, the owner, was waiting outside for us, alongside his twenty-two-year-old son, George, and three teen-age nieces. Mavrogiannis invited us to sit down while George translated his words into English. George explained that his father had started the business five years ago, having worked for other cheese companies since he was a teen-ager. George’s father had grown up around sheep and goats: he was the son of a tsopani, or shepherd. The family now owned a hundred sheep and three hundred goats, and they also processed milk from neighboring farmers, manufacturing not just yogurt but cheese, which they sold in a small store in Athens run by another son, and in a shop in Argos run by Mavrogiannis’s wife, Aggeliki.
We went inside, where Theodosius showed me a vat, about the size of a wine barrel, where sheep’s milk was pasteurized before being mixed with yogurt cultures. Then we entered a heated room, the size of a walk-in closet, in which the milk-and-culture mixture, having been poured into small terra-cotta pots ready for vending, was left for several hours to turn into yogurt. There was no sign of a yogurt separator, and, after I remarked, puzzled, on its absence, George explained that when the Greeks talk about yogurt they mean the stuff that still contains whey. In Greece, I learned, strained yogurt—what Chobani, Fage, and others market in America as Greek—has another name, straggisto. It was sold not in the traditional terra-cotta pots but in plastic tubs, and was useful for cooking because it kept in the fridge for ten days, whereas traditional yogurt stays fresh for only five. “We use straggisto for tzatziki,” George said.
Theodosius, having understood that I was interested in learning about strained yogurt, disappeared around a door and returned bearing the company’s single yogurt separator: a white cloth pillowcase, complete with piping on its seams. “We put the yogurt into here, and the whey drips out,” George explained, while his father beamed at his innovation.
We went outside and sat at a picnic table underneath a grape vine, while the nieces brought forth the Mavrogiannis cheeses: a salty, feta-like one, a hard yellow one, and a soft, young one that slid off the knife like Jell-O. A two-pound terra-cotta pot of yogurt was set in front of us, along with hunks of bread and slices of tomato picked from a patch nearby. “The sheep eat everything you see,” George said, reeling off a list that included barley, oats, clover, and vetch.
The mountains surrounding the property looked parched—not at all like the green hills of central New York—and George explained that his family’s yogurt production was seasonal. For several months in the summer, their sheep produce no milk; they start up again when the weather cools and the lambing cycle begins. In order to make yogurt for me to try, he said, they had brought in supplies of milk from another farm. I had become so accustomed to the range of competing yogurt products on the shelf of my local grocery that it had not even occurred to me that yogurt had seasons, and that the production of different dairies might, like wine, have a terroir. Theodosius Mavrogiannis spooned his yogurt into glass bowls for us to try, cutting through a thin layer of cream that had risen to the surface as the cultures did their work. The yogurt was cool and sweet and mild in flavor, with a texture like panna cotta—holding its shape, like a very soft jelly, but still creamy upon the tongue. It was, as Diane Kochilas had promised, the best yogurt I have ever eaten.
When I visited Ulukaya in New Berlin, he told me that he’d made one mistake in branding Chobani: it might have been better if he’d called it “strained yogurt,” not “Greek yogurt.” In the U.K., where Chobani is currently expanding, regulations do not permit a yogurt that isn’t actually made in Greece to be called “Greek yogurt”; moreover, yogurts marketed there as “Greek style” sometimes have added gelatin or milk solids, and Chobani worries about customers becoming confused. Chobani is also expanding to Australia, not just to satisfy the tastes of Australian consumers but potentially to provide a base from which to enter the enormous Asian food market. Traditionally, the Chinese are not a yogurt-eating people. But they are increasingly skeptical of their own food sources, on safety grounds, and among China’s rising affluent classes Western foodstuffs have become fashionable. If Ulukaya can persuade the Chinese to embrace Chobani, the scale of his operations in New Berlin will look artisanal by comparison.
Ulukaya believes that the U.S. market has room for enormous growth, too. So far, he says, Chobani has just taken consumers away from the other yogurt brands; it hasn’t yet secured a whole new base, or made consumers increase their yogurt intake. “If you look at the data, compared with Europe or Canada, Americans are eating two to four times less yogurt,” he told me. “Men are not touching it. The elders are not eating it, because they never grew up with it.” Other yogurt companies have had the same insight, including the category giant, Dannon, which has adopted John Stamos as its Greek-American spokesperson and has been advertising Oikos during the Super Bowl and in men’s magazines. According to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, an industry-research firm, Chobani, which commanded half the Greek-yogurt market two years ago, has since lost about ten per cent of its share; Dannon’s share has risen from eighteen to twenty-nine per cent. To hold on to its consumers, and to win new ones, Chobani is releasing new products, among them Chobani Bites, hundred-calorie pots that contain flavored yogurt with treats such as chocolate or caramel, aimed at the mid-afternoon or late-night snacker. Recently, Chobani won a contract for a pilot program to put its yogurt in school lunches, thereby opening an opportunity to build brand loyalty at the earliest of ages.
Ulukaya has aspirations beyond yogurt. “We never call ourselves a yogurt company,” he said. “The whole supermarket is my playground, so long as it is made by me, and it is delicious, natural, nutritious, and accessible.” Before I left his house, I asked to peek inside his refrigerator. There was a Whole Foods organic chicken that he was planning to cook that evening, many fresh vegetables, and a carton of chia seeds—which, at his suggestion, had been incorporated into the Blueberry Power Flip. (Chia seeds are rich in omega-3 fatty acids.) There were also at least a dozen different beverages, all of which contained ingredients with trendy, allegedly salubrious properties, like açaí berries and kombucha. “I go to the store and I get things I haven’t tried before,” he said.
In a shelf on the refrigerator door was a packet of butter, imported from Normandy and made by Isigny Sainte-Mère. Ulukaya said that he loved the flavor—he could eat the whole thing by itself. It was so much better than what was generally available. There was a glimmer in his eye that suggested he was looking beyond putting it on toast, or using it to glaze the carrots that sat in the crisper. “Somebody has to do something with butter,” he said. ♦
