Jul 14, 2025 · 1h 28m · how-i-built-this
Chobani: Hamdi Ulukaya (2022)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of How I Built This, host Guy Raz interviews Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya, tracing his remarkable journey from a semi-nomadic upbringing in Turkey to building America's leading Greek yogurt brand through relentless product perfection, independent financing, and community-centered business practices.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 31.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 4.9 Guest teaching 3.8 Guest disagreement 0.6 Guy pushing back 1.7
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:16:40 Hamdi refuses predatory takeover conditions
Hamdi emphatically recounts telling predatory investors he would rather take the company into bankruptcy than surrender control and live with daily regret.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 41:45 Guy questions the sanity of buying Kraft's abandoned factoryGuy presses Hamdi on why he thought he could succeed where the world's largest food company failed, affirming that Hamdi's lawyer was completely right to call the plan absurd.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:15:55 Hamdi reveals near-bankruptcy following Idaho plant crisisHamdi educates Guy and the audience by revealing for the first time that the 2013 Idaho recall triggered loan calls that brought Chobani within hours of filing Chapter 11.
Guy holds their own ▶ 1:21:15 Guy cites Wall Street Journal scrutiny and governance pressureGuy brings up specific reporting from the Wall Street Journal questioning Hamdi's executive capability during Chobani's restructuring, pushing him to address his operational limitations.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semi-Nomadic Roots and Upbringing in Eastern Turkey | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Guy Raz asks about Hamdi's upbringing in a semi-nomadic Kurdish community, comparing it to nomadic life in Tibet or Asian steppes. Hamdi clarifies the nature of their lifestyle, explaining that while isolated, they did not consider themselves poor and enjoyed a decent standard of living. | |
| Leaving Turkey and Emotional Farewell to Family | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Guy guides Hamdi through his student days in Ankara and his sudden decision to move to the U.S. to learn English. Hamdi shares an emotional account of saying goodbye to his mother before flying out. | |
| Arriving in the U.S. and Life on an Upstate New York Farm | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Guy explores Hamdi's arrival in New York with limited money and no English, leading to an English class essay about cheesemaking. Hamdi explains how this connected him with a professor's farm in upstate New York where he worked and milked cows daily. | |
| Launching a Feta Import Business and the Loss of Hamdi's Mother | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Guy and Hamdi discuss how Hamdi's father prompted him to start importing feta cheese from Turkey to New York. Hamdi reflects on the venture's early success and the devastating personal loss of his mother to liver disease. | |
| The Idea for Domestic Cheese Production and Mid-Show Break | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Guy probes the transition from importing cheese to opening the Euphrates manufacturing plant in Johnstown, New York. Hamdi explains the harsh reality of manufacturing, noting that pasteurized commercial milk behaves very differently from traditional methods and required grueling distribution runs to small diners. | |
| Discovering the Abandoned Kraft Yogurt Plant | 5 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Hamdi recounts finding a piece of junk mail advertising a shuttered Kraft yogurt plant in South Edmiston for $700,000. Guy points out that Hamdi's lawyer was justified in calling the idea crazy since a corporate giant like Kraft was abandoning the facility and Hamdi had no capital. | |
| Securing Financing and Envisioning Better Yogurt | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Guy asks Hamdi how he convinced an SBA-backed bank to lend him the funds despite having no formal business plan. Hamdi explains his core insight: American yogurt at the time was terrible compared to traditional strained Mediterranean yogurt. | |
| Rebuilding the Factory and Naming Chobani | 5 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Hamdi explains how he hired back four key former plant workers to get the facility running without blueprints. Guy and Hamdi discuss sourcing a used centrifuge separator and how Hamdi coined the name Chobani while driving through Wisconsin. | |
| Perfecting the Recipe, Cup Design, and Mid-Show Break | 5 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Hamdi details his obsession with packaging aesthetics, sourcing wide-mouth European-style cups from Colombia and demanding custom foil tops. Guy notes Hamdi's intense perfectionism, with Hamdi recalling that seeing yogurt stick to the lid ruined his whole day. | |
| Retail Breakthrough with ShopRite | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Guy asks why Hamdi gambled on mass retail like ShopRite instead of starting with Whole Foods. Hamdi recounts offering his factory as collateral for slotting fees to ensure ordinary consumers could buy high-quality yogurt. | |
| Scaling Production and Integrating Refugee Workforce | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Guy highlights the operational chaos of keeping up with explosive supermarket orders around the clock. Hamdi shares how partnering with a local refugee center in Utica helped solve labor shortages while providing vital opportunities for new arrivals. | |
| Rapid Growth to $1 Billion and Rejecting Buyout Offers | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Guy drills into how Hamdi scaled to $1 billion in revenue using cash flow without outside equity. Hamdi describes being courted by food giants with multi-billion-dollar acquisition offers and choosing to turn them down to stay in the game. | |
| Rapid Expansion to Idaho and the Mold Recall | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Guy discusses the decision to rapidly construct a million-square-foot facility in Twin Falls, Idaho. Hamdi candidly admits that rushing the build led to organizational strain and a severe mold recall in 2013. | |
| Staving Off Bankruptcy and Refusing Predatory Takeovers | 5 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Hamdi reveals for the first time publicly that Chobani came within 24 hours of filing for bankruptcy following the recall. He explains rejecting opportunistic takeover offers demanding majority equity, stating he preferred to bury the company himself rather than die a slow corporate death. | |
| Evolving Leadership and Social Advocacy | 6 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Guy presses Hamdi on the 2014 TPG investment, executive scrutiny, and his high-profile public stances on immigration and refugee advocacy. Hamdi explains that social advocacy is embedded in the company's DNA and operational success. | |
| Reflections on the American Dream and Legacy | 5 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Guy asks Hamdi his signature closing question regarding the mix of hard work versus luck. Hamdi metaphorically reflects on bringing a traditional seed that flourished in American soil and the duty to protect that opportunity for future generations. |
Statements from this episode (24)
Ulukaya's father was a Turkish tribal leader who aggregated and sold cheese
“So he was Aga. So Aga means he's the leader of the tribe. And my father kind of didn't want to follow that tradition, but he was kind of natural leader. Now, because you're Aga, you don't have other things. Like, you know, we didn't have bicycles, for example.…”
Ulukaya: Making slightly better versions of terrible existing products offers endless opportunity
“Given there were domestic feta being made here, the problem was it was horrible. Like, literally awful. Like, it was so bad. And say, okay, people are buying this stuff, so if you make it a little bit better, you know, it's endless. So, this is no-brainer.”
Ulukaya: Euphrates secured a 90% USDA loan guarantee to finance equipment
“That we were given 90% guarantee, or the banks was given 90% guarantee.”
Ulukaya: Euphrates survived by securing hundreds of small regional feta distributors
“I have to go between Boston or New Hampshire or Maine to all the way down to Florida and eastwise, maybe Detroit and Chicago and find all these small distributors that would buy one or two pallets a month. I slept on the roads with the van. And meet all these …”
Ulukaya: Kraft listed its yogurt plant for sale for $700,000
“And I asked the price, I said, what's the price? He said, 700,000 dollars.”
American yogurt was awful and ten times worse than Turkish yogurt
“But compared to what it was here, the yogurt was 10 times worse. It was literally horrible. Like, it was awful stuff.”
Ulukaya: Commercial Greek yogurt production requires a centrifuge separator costing nearly $1M
“In a, commercially, this cannot be done with a cheesecloth. It needs to be centrifuge separator. And these separators are, you know, I would say, you know, close to a million dollars by the time.”
Ulukaya: US packaging firms refused Chobani's cups, forcing Colombian sourcing
“And I found out that there is a plant in Bogota, Colombia that I went and they said, we will make it for you. We will sleeve it for you and we'll ship it for you. And I said, that was good because none of the packaging companies here would make it for me.”
Ulukaya: Distinctive packaging catches the eye, but product quality finishes conversion
“My view was, I spent so much time making this yogurt and I think it's one of the best that I've made, and people will not, you know, see the difference if I put them in the same cups, so if I can't catch their eye, Have them to try it once, the yogurt will fin…”
Ulukaya: Chobani prioritized mainstream grocery stores over specialty natural channels
“I did not have huge interest on natural channels. I wanted this product to be in a mass channels where ordinary people shop.”
Ulukaya offered his factory as collateral to secure supermarket shelf space
“I personally said, if it doesn't sell, I will give you the factory.”
Ulukaya: Chobani launched into supermarkets priced below manufacturing cost
“And then I priced it below my cost at the time.”
Ulukaya: Chobani needed 20,000 cases to break even at launch
“But I had a simple napkin calculation. If I reached the 20,000 cases, I would break even. And everything after that, it would be you know, profitable.”
Chobani hired refugees and provided translators to overcome manufacturing labor shortages
“I called the refugee center, and I said, what is the problem? And she said these are people who have a right to work, legally settled, and they don't speak the language, they don't have, you know, transportation, or people don't want to touch it because it's a…”
Ulukaya: Chobani ran on QuickBooks until reaching $600M in revenue
“You know, at that time, you know, not only two hundred and fifty million, until six hundred million dollars, I run that company on QuickBooks.”
Chobani generated $1 billion in five years with zero outside capital
“And everything, everything in Chobani was Internally finance. We never had a an outside investors. So I had over a billion in sales in, in five years, and making really, really good margins, good profits.”
Big Food corporations will inevitably try to buy you or copy you
“You build something, the big food is going to come with two things. One do you want to sell? And in that is a hidden another, you know, information. If you don't sell, I'll make the same thing.”
Ulukaya: Chobani received multi-billion dollar acquisition offers from Big Food
“And they did come, and they said, what about selling? And the numbers were with billions.”
Ulukaya: Chobani built 1M-sq-ft Idaho plant in under a year
“At that time, it was close to one million square feet plant. And with the 14 lines, we built it less than one year.”
Ulukaya would expand Chobani in slower stages if done over
“I would have been more prepared than I would have done in In stages, I wouldn't do it in as fast. I would be more cautious. I would put more, you know, team members in place and make some changes.”
Ulukaya: Chobani Was One Night From Bankruptcy Before Lender Intervened
“One night before, before we filed, the banker called and said, Hamdi, we hear that you're going to do this. It's going to make us look so bad. I think they were also acting, acting really out of ordinary at that time, forcing me to do something. And he says, w…”
Ulukaya: Chobani interviewed five or six CEO candidates between 2009 and 2011
“The problem with the CEO things is through this journey of my, from 2009 to 2011, I probably interviewed Five, maybe six candidates for CEO. And every time I interview the person, and I would see a dimension that would not fit Chobani. I would see a dimension …”