He Came to America With Almost Nothing — and Turned a Shuttered Factory Into a Billion-Dollar Empire

The Wrong Country, the Wrong Language, the Wrong Business

In 1994, a young Kurdish man from a small goat-farming village in eastern Turkey stepped off a plane in New York City. His name was Hamdi Ulukaya. He had come to study English, which he barely spoke. He had almost no money. He had no connections in the food industry, no background in manufacturing, and no obvious reason to believe that America had a place for him.

He also had no idea he was about to change the way America eats breakfast.

For years, Ulukaya bounced around. He studied. He worked. He started a small feta cheese company in upstate New York that kept him afloat without exactly setting the world on fire. He was building something, though he couldn't have told you exactly what.

Then, in 2005, a piece of junk mail changed everything.

The Ad Nobody Else Responded To

The letter was from Kraft Foods. It announced that a yogurt plant in Johnstown, New York — a factory that had been running for nearly a century — was closing. The equipment was being sold off. The workers were being let go. The building would be shuttered.

Kraft had done the math. The plant wasn't profitable enough. The American yogurt market was sleepy and commoditized. Nobody was clamoring for more yogurt.

Ulukaya drove out to see the place anyway.

What he found was a deteriorating 85-year-old facility in a town that had been economically hollowing out for decades. Johnstown had already lost most of its manufacturing base. The yogurt plant was one of the last anchors. When it closed, nearly a hundred workers lost their jobs.

Ulukaya made an offer. He paid somewhere around $700,000 — financed almost entirely through a small business loan — for a factory that a Fortune 500 company had decided wasn't worth keeping. His lawyer reportedly told him he was making a mistake. His accountant was not enthusiastic either.

He bought it anyway.

Building Something Nobody Asked For

The product Ulukaya had in mind was Greek yogurt — thick, high-protein, strained the traditional way. Americans in 2005 were not exactly clamoring for it. The yogurt aisle was dominated by Yoplait and Dannon, brands that had spent decades training American consumers to expect sweet, thin, brightly colored cups of something that was technically yogurt but wasn't trying very hard to be.

Ulukaya hired back some of the workers Kraft had laid off. He spent two years developing his recipe, running the plant on fumes, refining the product until it was something he actually believed in. Chobani launched in 2007.

The timing, by accident or instinct, was almost perfect. Americans were starting to pay closer attention to protein. The low-fat craze was giving way to something more nuanced. Ulukaya's yogurt was genuinely different — denser, tangier, more filling — and it stood out on a shelf that hadn't seen real innovation in years.

Retailers were skeptical. Ulukaya drove the product around himself, walking it into stores, handing out samples, making the case one conversation at a time. It was not a sophisticated go-to-market strategy. It worked anyway.

The Town That Came Back With Him

Within a few years, Chobani wasn't just a hit — it was a phenomenon. The company eventually captured more than 20 percent of the U.S. yogurt market. Revenue climbed into the billions. The Johnstown plant, which Kraft had written off as a liability, became one of the largest yogurt manufacturing facilities in the world.

But the more surprising part of the story isn't the market share. It's what Ulukaya did with the success.

He hired refugees — thousands of them, from Somalia, Bosnia, Myanmar, and elsewhere — at a time when the political conversation around immigration was growing uglier by the year. He gave employees equity stakes in the company. He signed the Giving Pledge, committing the majority of his wealth to philanthropy. He built a foundation focused on refugee support globally.

He also never moved the company out of upstate New York, even when it would have been cheaper to do so.

Johnstown didn't become a boomtown. Rust Belt economics are more stubborn than any single success story. But the plant employed thousands of people in a region that had been written off, paid wages above the local average, and gave a struggling community something it badly needed: evidence that it wasn't finished.

What an Unlikely Match Can Build

The version of this story that gets told in business school is about market disruption and operational efficiency. That version is true, but it misses the texture of what actually happened.

A Kurdish goat farmer's son with a student visa and almost no capital looked at a condemned factory in a dying town and saw something that a multinational corporation with every advantage could not: potential. Not just economic potential — human potential. The potential of workers who still knew how to make something. The potential of a community that hadn't given up, even when everyone else had.

Two unlikely things found each other at the right moment. What they built together turned out to be worth a lot more than yogurt.