Greek yogurt maker Chobani is planning to open the biggest dairy factory in the U.S. in upstate New York, two decades after opening its first factory in the state.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Tuesday in an Instagram post that Chobani is building a $1.2 billion facility in Rome, New York, marking the nation’s “largest natural food production facility anywhere.” Hochul added that the facility will create “over 1,000 good-paying jobs” in the state. The factory will be constructed by the end of 2026, per Food Dive.
“New York is where Chobani’s journey began,” Chobani founder and CEO Hamdi Ulukaya stated in a press release. “It was the perfect spot to start Chobani 20 years ago, and it’s the perfect place to continue our story.”
The factory will have 1.4 million square feet of manufacturing space and the capacity to make one billion pounds of dairy products every year, per The New York Times. Chobani makes a variety of yogurt products, oat milk, ready-to-drink coffee beverages, and creamers.
Chobani needs to construct the factory to keep pace with the growing demand over the past few years. The company doubled its earnings in the first nine months of 2023, reaching net sales of $2.52 billion for the year overall. In December 2023, Chobani bought ready-to-drink coffee maker Colombe for $900 million.
It continued that growth trajectory into 2024, hitting net sales of $2.96 billion, an increase of 17% from 2023, per The Times. The company’s adjusted pretax earnings climbed 26% in 2024 to $509 million.
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The company conducted a nationwide search before settling on Rome, New York, as the site of its next production facility. It’s only about 50 miles from Chobani’s first factory in South Edmeston, New York.
So far, New York State has contributed $23 million to the project to get the site prepped for construction, and Oneida County has contributed an additional $6 million.
Ulukaya started Chobani in 2005 by purchasing a yogurt factory in South Edmeston that was being closed by Kraft. He bought the facility for $700,000 with the help of a small business loan and spent the next two years perfecting the product, eventually launching Chobani’s first offering, its Greek yogurt, in 2007.
Chobani now reports holding about a fifth of the $8.6 billion U.S. yogurt market, or 20.8% market share.
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Ulukaya founded Chobani with no business degree or prior experience building a company. He told the Harvard Business Review (HBR) in April 2022 that creating Chobani was “a personal journey” of determining how to run the company at different stages of growth.
In 2016, Ulukaya surprised Chobani’s full-time employees (around 2,000 at the time) with equity stakes of up to 10% in the company, based on tenure or the length of their employment. This decision would turn some employees into millionaires when Chobani eventually goes public. The company filed for an initial public offering in 2021 at a valuation exceeding $10 billion but withdrew it the following year due to unfavorable market conditions.
