Hamdi Ulukaya

Hamdi Ulukaya (born 1972) is a Turkish-American billionaire businessman of Kurdish ethnicity, the founder, owner and CEO of the Chobani yogurt company, named Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year in 2013 ^{1 2}.

Ulukaya was born in 1972 to a Kurdish dairy-farming family in Ilic, Erzincan, by the Euphrates River, one of seven children, and he is uncertain of his exact birth date, which he marks on 26 October ^{1 2}. Studying political science at Ankara University he joined the Kurdish-rights movement, and in 1994 he moved to the United States, citing the Turkish state's oppression of its Kurdish minority ¹.

After importing his family's feta cheese and opening a small plant in 2002, Ulukaya bought a closed Kraft yogurt factory in South Edmeston, New York, in 2005 and launched Chobani in 2007, reaching over a billion dollars in annual sales within five years and opening the world's largest yogurt plant in Twin Falls, Idaho, in 2012 ^{1 2}. He has given away much of his wealth, founded the Tent Partnership for Refugees to mobilise business hiring of refugees, and in 2022 was appointed a UN advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals ¹. No text read for this record names a faith for Ulukaya himself, so his faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 2 3}.

• ¹
• ²
• ³