NEW BERLIN -- The founder of Chobani Yogurt, Hamdi Ulukaya, is all smiles these days. His company has only been around for five short years, and in that time it has grown at an incredible rate.
He says he expects $1 billion in sales this year. That’s a lot of dough for the dairy industry.
Ulukaya is essentially redefining modern business practices, and he did it by creating a product you didn’t know you wanted, and he started producing it in a place that has fallen on some hard times economically.
That place: New Berlin, NY.
Ulukaya has done away with the traditional marketing techniques and decided to push his product his way: through social media.
Some liken it to the way President Barack Obama utilized social media to motivate voters in the 2008 election. Chobani has become the name brand behind the Greek yogurt craze, and the Turkish immigrant has built that name from scratch.
Ulukaya says that people love his yogurt because it is truly a wholesome product.
“It's shame, what's in the supermarkets today, it really is. It doesn't have to have all these preservative. It doesn't have to have all these bad colors and stuff like that. It doesn't.” he says.
Ulukaya believes the manufacturer is responsible for the quality of their products, and that’s something he takes very seriously.
Perhaps that’s a lesson other companies need to learn, and it’s something Chobani is living proof of: Quality first, and the quantity will follow.
