Not the Go-Gurt type... When a Kurdish businessman from Turkey took over a shuttered Kraft yogurt plant in New York, Chobani was just a cool sound. 15 years later, it's the most famous Greek yogurt brand in America — with an estimated $1.5B+ in yearly sales.
- But yogurt peaked circa 2015, so Chobani got on the oat train, launching oat milks and creamers in late 2019. The logical next step...
- Chobani's launching coffee. The new line of ready-to-drink (RTD) coffees: sweet cream cold brew, cold brew with vanilla creamer, and oat milk cold brew (theme: cold brew).
Not the Star Wars robot... That's R2-D2. RTD coffee is one of the fastest growing segments of the non-alcoholic bev industry: sales surged 17% from October 2019 to October 2020. Basically, the hard seltzer of the caffeine world. You're not doing your typical morning Starbs run. Instead, you have a Starbucks RTD can in the fridge for your 8 am Zoom call — or if you're fancy, a Trader Joe's La Colombe. Chobani will face big competition with Starbucks and Stok, which own over 70% of the $4.6B RTD coffee market, combined.
It's "Branded House" vs. "House of Brands"... We’ve seen Big Food companies expand from their core product to entirely new brands — by acquiring or creating sub-brands. Kellogg started with corn flakes, but now owns brands from Cheez-Its, to Pringles — but you still associate it with cereal. Kraft is known for mac-n-cheese, but owns Planters peanuts, Jell-O, Capri Sun, and every other brand in your 3rd grade lunch (shoutout Lunchables). Chobani represents the opposite: a single branded house that’s putting its own powerful brand front-and-center to develop new product lines.