18-03-2025
- Politics
- National Geographic
Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya believes refugees make companies stronger
The son of nomadic sheep farmers and a member of Turkey's ethnic Kurdish minority, Hamdi Ulukaya was the first in his family to go to college, enrolling at Ankara University. It was the early nineties, a time of heightened tensions between government forces and Kurdish separatists, and Ulukaya founded a newspaper in which he called out the human rights abuses faced by his fellow Kurds. One day, he recalls, he was taken into police custody. He was only detained for a night, but the experience convinced him that he needed to leave the country. 'I was forced to leave,' he says. 'I did not leave because I dreamed about going to America.'
He went to an agency that helped him transfer to Adelphi University, on Long Island, New York, where he learned English. Eventually, he started a business importing his family's feta cheese, and in 2005 he read about a yogurt plant for sale near the city of Utica. Suddenly, he had a vision: He would start his own company making Turkish-style yogurt, thick and tangy. He had no real money, no business education. But he cobbled together a loan and started Chobani (Turkish for 'shepherd'). Seven years later, they were doing a billion dollars in sales.
Ulukaya often thinks about others who arrive in this country fleeing persecution. That's what brought him to the refugee resettlement center in Utica, where he encountered people of some 16 different nationalities. 'The only reason they don't work is they don't have driver's licenses or cars,' he says. 'And they don't speak the language. I said, 'Okay. Similar to me.'' He hired five refugees, then 10, then 300, including Somalis, Nepalis, and Afghans. Over 20 languages were spoken at the yogurt plant, yet he felt that somehow his workforce was more cohesive than ever.
