April 26, 2016
“I built something I never thought would be so successful, but I can not imagine Chobani being built without all these people,” said Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of the company that “addicted” Americans to Greek-style yogurt. And he rewards his employees, giving them 10% of his company.
At the time, Chobani was valued at $ 5 billion, which means that the oldest of the 2,000 employees are becoming millionaires.
On that day, each employee received a white package stating the terms of the donation and the number of shares to which they are entitled. As the shares were distributed based on the previous service in the company, the more years someone worked at Chobani, the more shares he got.
“Now they will work to build the company even more and build their future at the same time,” Ulukaya told the New York Times.
According to the donation, the approximately 2,000 employees will receive 10% of the company when it is sold or listed on the stock exchange. And the second of these options is near.
Chobani applied for listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange in November 2021, with information saying that its listing will be valued at more than $ 10 billion. This means that employees will share more than $ 500 million.
Since then, Ulukaya has been forced to postpone the IPO, as the market for initial public records has been “frozen”. Now, he plans to wait at least until the second half of 2022 or even 2023.
He taught Americans to eat “greek yoghurt”
The son of a Kurdish cattle breeder, Ulukaya lived a semi-nomadic life in Anatolia until his parents sent him to New York to learn English.
When his father called him in 1996, saying he planned to visit him, the 26-year-old student sought to find what they used to eat for breakfast at their home in Turkey: Bread, olives and feta cheese. Surprised to find that the best feta he could find in American supermarkets was completely tasteless compared to the one his family made in Turkey, Ulukaya unknowingly took the first step to becoming a billionaire.
In the following years, he adapted their family recipe to the local ingredients and tastes of American consumers and began selling his own feta, which he called “Euphrates”. He ran his own small factory, handling sales, marketing, contacts with wholesale customers. He even did the distributions himself, and sometimes, exhausted from a lot of work, he slept in his pickup truck.
The opportunity of a lifetime, however, came through the mail, when a local real estate agency sent him a brochure advertising a factory for sale. With a mechanical gesture, Ulukaya threw it in the trash, but soon reconsidered it, and very soon visited the property. It was an abandoned, almost 100-year-old Kraft yogurt factory on a New Berlin country street in central New York.
The immigrant from Turkey bought the factory with borrowed money and always having in mind the Greek yogurt that FAGE sold to the American delicacies, he spent two years perfecting his own recipe.
In 2007 he delivered his first shipment of Chobani yogurt to a Jewish supermarket in Long Island, and within the first year, he managed to sell $ 25 million. Today, Ulukaya regrets that in his first steps he chose to sell his product as “Greek yogurt”. In fact, what he did was introduce the American consumer public to strained yogurt, which was far removed from the watery, sugary, and preservative yogurts that had hitherto circulated in this huge market.
“Greek yoghurt” quickly became the new frenzy of the Americans and Chobani reached in 2012 to hold 44% of this rapidly growing market.
Today, Chobani holds one-fifth of the Greek yogurt market in the US (with a turnover of $ 10 billion a year) and is expanding dynamically into ready-made coffees and vegetable milks, which have great growth prospects.
Money Review
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