Chobani: Funding a Yogurt Giant With Loans, Bonds, and Shares

A Factory Found in the Mail

Hamdi Ulukaya moved from Turkey to the United States in 1994. He was running Euphrates, a small feta cheese company in Johnstown, New York, when an advertisement arrived in the mail in 2005: Kraft Foods was selling an old yogurt plant in New Berlin, a small town in upstate New York. Ulukaya toured the plant and decided the next day to buy it, more than two years before any Chobani yogurt would reach a store. The plant cost less than $1 million, and he paid for it with a loan backed by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). The purchase closed in August 2005.

The building was run-down and its yogurt-making equipment was aging. Ulukaya hired back five of Kraft’s former workers, and it was 2007 before the plant made its first cup of Chobani Greek yogurt, a thick yogurt with double the protein of the regular kind. That October, the first shipment went to a single grocery store on Long Island.

Growing Faster Than the Cash

Rather than limiting itself to specialty food shops, Chobani pitched its yogurt to mainstream grocery chains, hoping to win over even shoppers who had never liked yogurt. Demand took off. Less than four years after launch, the New York plant was running three shifts a day and producing 1.2 million cases of yogurt a week, and its workforce had grown from fewer than 50 people to 670. Greek yogurt went from less than 1% of the yogurt market when Ulukaya started to more than half of it by 2014, and Chobani’s yearly sales passed $1 billion by 2013.

Growth like that is expensive. Chobani spent about $250 million upgrading its New York plant and at least $450 million building a new factory in Twin Falls, Idaho. Big competitors noticed, too: Dannon and Yoplait (then owned by General Mills) launched their own Greek-style yogurts. Then, in the fall of 2013, Chobani had to recall yogurt that had grown mold.

2014: A $750 Million Loan With a Twist

In April 2014, Chobani announced a $750 million deal with TPG Capital, a large private equity firm. The deal was structured like a loan, so Chobani would have to pay the money back. But TPG also received warrants, which it could later turn into an ownership stake in Chobani. The full terms were not made public. The New York Times reported that the warrants could give TPG up to 35% of the company, and Fortune reported, citing a person close to the deal, that the size of the stake depended on whether Chobani met certain performance goals. TPG also got two seats on Chobani’s board of directors. The money was meant to pay for new products and expansion into markets in Asia and South America. At the time, Ulukaya told Fortune that an initial public offering (IPO) was probably Chobani’s next big step, though not within the next year.

New Partners and a Shelved IPO

In April 2016, Ulukaya announced that Chobani’s roughly 2,000 employees would receive shares that could eventually add up to about 10% of the company, with the longest-serving workers getting the largest shares. Those shares would become valuable if Chobani were sold or went public. In mid-2018, TPG exited its investment, and the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP), a Canadian pension fund, bought a minority stake that came with one board seat.

In November 2021, Chobani filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to sell shares to the public. The filing showed that Chobani had about $1.4 billion in net sales in 2020 and a net loss of $58.7 million. As of September 2021, it owed about $1.4 billion, including a term loan, bonds with interest rates of 7.50% and 4.625%, and equipment financing. Chobani was owned by Ulukaya, its employees, and HOOPP: Ulukaya beneficially owned 80% of the holding company that held Chobani’s main class of ownership units, and HOOPP owned the other 20%. Chobani planned to use part of the IPO money to pay down debt. But in September 2022, as the market for new stock offerings slumped, Chobani withdrew its IPO plans, citing market conditions.

New Money for New Plants

Chobani kept growing as a private company. It bought coffee maker La Colombe for $900 million in 2023, and in 2024 it was the top-selling yogurt brand in the United States. In October 2025, it raised $650 million in equity capital, meaning it sold ownership stakes to investors (Forbes did not name them). Forbes reported that the deal valued Chobani at about $20 billion and estimated that Ulukaya still owned about 68% of the company. Chobani expected about $3.8 billion in sales for 2025, up 28% from 2024. The new money was meant for growing production in Idaho and New York, including a $1.2 billion plant in Rome, New York.

Chobani also kept borrowing. In April 2026, it sold $800 million of new bonds that pay 6.375% interest a year and are due in 2034, in order to pay off older notes, due in 2029, that carried interest rates of 8.75% to 9.5%. Meanwhile, the Rome plant fell behind schedule. In August 2026, Chief Impact Officer Nishant Roy said Chobani had shifted its priorities to its existing plants to get products to market faster and meet growing demand, and the first phase of construction in Rome was expected to start between spring 2027 and summer 2028. More than 20 years after buying a run-down factory with a small-business loan, Chobani was still weighing, project by project, when to borrow money and when to share ownership.