Chobani

Chobani is a New York food manufacturer founded in 2005 that has become one of the more active industrial developers in the United States through its own plant program. The company states it is investing more than $4 billion across its U.S. manufacturing network, and it builds and expands facilities as an owner rather than leasing production capacity. That program includes a $1.2 billion plant in Rome, New York, a $500 million expansion at Twin Falls, Idaho announced in 2025, and a $1.2 billion commitment in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Chobani is buying a 2021-built facility from Keurig Dr Pepper for $125 million and scaling it toward 10 production lines and 1.5 million square feet.

The origin is well documented and unusually specific: in 2005 Hamdi Ulukaya took out a loan, bought a shuttered yogurt plant in upstate New York, and started making Greek yogurt in a building the previous owner had given up on. The name comes from the Turkish word for shepherd.

That first plant is the reason a food manufacturer appears in a construction directory at all. Chobani has been reworking and expanding physical production capacity ever since, and the company’s own framing of its purpose, delicious and nutritious and natural and accessible, reads as a manufacturing brief as much as a marketing one, since accessibility at scale is a plant-capacity problem before it is anything else.

The product range has widened well past the original tubs. Alongside Greek yogurt the company sells the Flip snack format, high-protein lines and no-sugar-added lines, and it reaches customers through two channels beyond the grocery aisle: a Chobani Cafe retail concept and an Away From Home foodservice supply arm. Each of those needs different production and packaging capability.

Two standing programs sit alongside the product work. Innovation is run as a continuous product development function, and Cultivating Progress is the company’s social impact platform, which includes a Good Food For All initiative.