NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, December 17, 2019

By Claire Cozens

Businesses that fail to look beyond the bottom line will not survive as consumer pressure also to do good mounts, said the billionaire behind top-selling U.S. yoghurt brand Chobani.

Hamdi Ulukaya, who grew up in a family of semi-nomadic Kurdish shepherds in Turkey before emigrating to the United States in his 20s, said the days of companies being run solely to maximise profit for shareholders were over.

His company, Chobani, has a policy of including refugees in its workforce and he has pledged much of his personal fortune to helping those forcibly displaced through his Tent Refugee Partnership, a charity that mobilises companies to do more.

“I think businesses that do not get involved with this type of humanitarian issues are not going to exist in the next generation,” Ulukaya told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview ahead of the Global Forum on Refugees in Geneva.

Photo courtesy of Tim Mossholder.