An emigrant cheesemaker, a factory for sale and a strained yogurt.

Chobani is an American food company built around strained yogurt. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 2005 by Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish businessman who emigrated to the United States in 1994, and that the business began in March 2005 under the name Agro Farma at South Edmeston, New York. Wikipedia lists the company as privately held, with Ulukaya as its chief executive.

The start was a factory that another company was leaving. Wikipedia says Ulukaya bought a plant in South Edmeston that Kraft Foods was closing, financing the purchase with a Small Business Administration loan, and hired several of the former Kraft employees. The Alliance for American Manufacturing wrote on 23 August 2012 that Kraft had decided to close its yogurt factory there in 2005, leaving its workers out of a job, and that Ulukaya stepped in to buy the plant and start a yogurt company of his own.

The product took time to develop. Wikipedia says Ulukaya drew on a childhood spent raising sheep and goats and making cheese with his family, and that he hired a yogurt master from Turkey to develop a recipe with him, testing different cultures, temperatures and fermentation times. Straining removes the whey, which Wikipedia says gives a thicker, creamier and tangier yogurt. Ulukaya has said, according to Wikipedia, that the name Chobani comes from the Greek word “chopani”.

The yogurt reached shoppers two years after the plant changed hands. Wikipedia dates the brand’s launch to 2007, and the Alliance for American Manufacturing’s 2012 post said that by 2007 Chobani had begun producing yogurt. It quoted the Syracuse Post-Standard describing the former Kraft plant, south-east of Syracuse, as Chobani’s home since late 2007. Wikipedia lists the opening flavours as plain, vanilla, strawberry, peach and blueberry, and says the supermarket chains Stop & Shop and ShopRite began carrying the brand in 2009.

Australia, Idaho, a food incubator and a coffee roaster.

Chobani moved beyond upstate New York within a few years of launch. Wikipedia says that in November 2011 the company bought Bead Foods, a dairy business in Victoria, Australia, and began manufacturing at a plant in Dandenong South in December 2012.

The larger expansion was in the American West. FoodNavigator reported on 17 December 2012 that Chobani had opened its plant in Twin Falls, Idaho, after breaking ground on the site in December 2011. Ulukaya told the publication that Twin Falls was the company’s “second home” but would not replace its Central New York plant, which would keep operating. Wikipedia says Chobani opened a café in SoHo, New York City, in July 2012, and that the same year it became a sponsor of the US Olympic Team, premiering a national commercial during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Wikipedia traces further growth through the next decade. It says the company began distributing in Singapore, Malaysia and Panama in 2014, reached an investment deal with the private-equity firm TPG in April 2014, and introduced its products in Mexico in August 2016. In April 2016, Wikipedia says, Chobani announced it was giving part of its ownership to its employees. Ulukaya launched the Chobani Food Incubator in 2016 to support food and drink start-ups, and Wikipedia lists the chickpea-pasta brand Banza among its participants.

The company has since added other brands. Consumer Goods Technology reported on 19 December 2023 that Chobani had acquired the ready-to-drink coffee company La Colombe, in a deal finalised that month, and that La Colombe would continue as an independent brand. Wikipedia says Chobani acquired the meal company Daily Harvest in May 2025. Its company infobox gives Norwich, New York, as the headquarters until 2025 and New York City from 2025. Wikipedia also says that in 2025 Chobani secured naming rights to Fenerbahçe’s Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium in Istanbul.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all American yogurt names. Yogurt reaches people through a cup more than through any other object: a small tub of plastic or, less often, glass, kept cold from the dairy to the store and sealed with a foil or film lid under a snap-on cap. Single cups sit side by side in a chilled case, larger tubs sit on the shelf below, and multipacks are held together by a cardboard sleeve or a band, so a brand has to read clearly from a short distance and at a glance.

Because one spoonful of plain yogurt looks much like another, much of a yogurt brand’s identity is carried by the cup itself: its shape, the colour of the lid, the band of type around the side and the picture of fruit or flavour on the foil. The questions worth asking are plain ones: who started it, who owns it now, and where the yogurt is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a 1991 sans serif to a storybook wordmark.

Chobani’s early cups did not look like a farm product. AIGA Eye on Design reported on 12 March 2018 that from its founding the company had set its name on its plastic cups in Broadband, an angular sans serif designed in 1991. Leland Maschmeyer, a co-founder of the branding consultancy Collins, told the publication the typeface “didn’t make sense emotionally”. He joined Chobani as chief creative officer in 2016 and began work on a new identity.

The new look arrived for the brand’s tenth anniversary. The Drum reported on 28 November 2017 that Chobani was rolling out new packaging, shelf talkers and communications inspired by 19th-century American folk art. It said the wordmark had been altered to feel warmer and more approachable, and that the visual system used colours derived from real fruits, flowers, leaves and bark, with a handmade quality meant to bring playfulness to the brand. The new brand expression was the line “Fighting for happily ever after”. Maschmeyer told The Drum that the packaging idea had been created in-house by the marketing team, and the publication noted that the company had named Wieden+Kennedy its creative agency of record in 2016, after earlier work with Horizon Media and Droga5.

The lettering was built to match the illustration. AIGA Eye on Design said Maschmeyer replaced Broadband with a chubby typeface developed by Commercial Type, intended to evoke hand-drawn lettering from a fairytale book. He said his team had fallen for folk art, and in particular the handmade quality of quilted craftwork from New England, describing the result as “charmingly imperfect”. The same article quoted Armin Vit of the blog Brand New praising the identity for representing the product.

For a design guide, Chobani shows how a food brand can swap a cold, technical typeface for warm illustration and lettering once it outgrows its launch-era look, and do the work largely in-house. Compare it with Fage, the Athens dairy behind another strained Greek yogurt, and La Colombe, the coffee brand Chobani bought in 2023. For this guide we use bark brown, berry red, cream and leaf green with a chubby serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Chobani’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.