Hamdi Ulukaya

Hamdi Ulukaya was born in 1972 to a Kurdish farming family in eastern Turkey, where his parents made cheese and yoghurt on their land. He came to the United States in the early 1990s to improve his English and study, working odd jobs and eventually running a small feta cheese business with his father in upstate New York, learning the food trade from the ground rather than in an office.

In 2005 he saw a newspaper advertisement for a Kraft yoghurt plant in South Edmeston, New York, that was closing and putting its workers out of jobs. With a small Federal loan and no experience running a factory of that size, he bought it, kept most of the existing staff, and spent months experimenting to recreate the thick, strained yoghurt of his childhood for an American market that barely knew the style existed.

Chobani, launched in 2007, grew from nothing into one of the country's best-selling yoghurt brands within a few years, built on word of mouth rather than a marketing budget the young company did not have. As it grew, Ulukaya made a point of hiring refugees resettled nearby, reasoning that people who had rebuilt their lives once already made determined, loyal colleagues, and by the 2020s refugees made up a significant share of his workforce.

In 2016 he pledged the majority of his personal fortune to refugee causes and pushed publicly for businesses to do more for displaced people, arguing that a job, more than charity, was what let someone rebuild a life.