The Yoghurt King, $0-$5B in 5 years šŸØ

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2 minute wacky businesses, you can tell your buddies about šŸ§ 

Chobani is a yoghurt company, but it isnā€™t just a yoghurt company. Itā€™s a $5 billion powerhouse that defined an entire industry. The year is 2005, Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant, spots a piece of junk mail about an old Kraft factory for sale in Upstate New York. Hamdi saw gold. He buys it, hires a handful of laid-off employees, and boom, Chobani is born. Fast forward a 5 years, and Chobani is raking in over $1 billion in annual sales, becoming the leading yoghurt brand in the U.S. by 2011. Thatā€™s a meteoric rise, but it wasnā€™t just about the product, it was the way he built this empire that makes the story wild.

Battering and run-down factories šŸ§

Founded in 2005, Chobaniā€™s mission was to bring real, high-quality Greek yoghurt to the masses. Hamdi didnā€™t just want to slap a fancy label on a regular product, he wanted to make yoghurt the way it was made back in Turkey. So, he bought an 84-year-old factory from Kraft and started experimenting. He even brought in a ā€œyoghurt masterā€ from Turkey to help him perfect the recipe. Whatā€™s wild is that he was up against billion-dollar brands, but he still found a way to turn the tables on them.

He spent over a year refurbishing the old Kraft factory and bought a used $50,000 milk separator from Wisconsin (because the factory didnā€™t have one). He even found a sneaky way around the expensive ā€œslotting feesā€ that big brands pay to get on grocery store shelves, Hamdi didnā€™t have the cash for that, so he paid stores in yoghurt. He was bartering his way to market share. 

Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya

What are the nuggets? šŸ’Ž

šŸØ Origin: Hamdi had started a small feta cheese business in 2002 on his dadā€™s advice, but the real play came when he noticed the old yoghurt plant. On a whim, he drove up, took a look, and decided to buy it, against all the advice he was getting. To make it happen, he took out a loan from the Small Business Administration and got local grants. 

šŸØ The Early Grind: In October 2007, Hamdi shipped his first batch of Chobani. Just a few hundred cases, to a small grocer on Long Island. This was a ā€œletā€™s see what happensā€ kind of move. Well, the store repeated the order the next week, and the week after that. 

šŸØ An Awesome Play: Without a big ad budget, he relied on guerrilla marketing. After customers started phoning in saying they loved Chobani, his small team reached out directly through bloggers and influencers on Facebook, and Twitter. Then came the CHOmobile, a sampling truck that gave out 150,000 free full-size cups at festivals, parades, and family events across the U.S. 

šŸØ Inflection Moment: In 2009 Chobani got its products into Costco. Most brands wouldnā€™t touch Costco because of the thin margins, but Hamdi knew that if he could get businesses to connect people to the product, theyā€™d be hooked. 

šŸØ Funding: Initially, Hamdi bootstrapped. He took out an SBA loan, patched together local grants, and leaned on his small team. It wasnā€™t until 2014, years after the brand had blown up, that Chobani brought in private equity, $750 million from TPG. He used the cash to build the world's largest yoghurt plant in Idaho, a $450 million investment that turned the sleepy town into a booming job centre.

šŸØ The Big Leagues: When Chobani launched, Greek yoghurt was less than 1% of the U.S. yoghurt market. By 2017, it was over 50%, and Chobani had a huge hand in making that happen. Hamdiā€™s idea wasnā€™t just to make Greek yoghurt available, it was to make it the default. Think about that for a moment. The man didnā€™t just enter a market, he changed the entire thing for good.

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Laying Out The Figures šŸ’µ

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