How Chobani and Patagonia stay true to values while scaling

Executive overview

Two CEOs — Hamdi Ulukaya of Chobani and Ryan Gellert of Patagonia — discuss what it means to lead by values when political and commercial pressures push in the opposite direction. Both have built large, independent companies with strong social missions, but they navigate the current climate very differently.

Chobani finds common ground across divides and treats human dignity as a timeless constant. Patagonia speaks loudly on environmental threats because protecting the natural world is its entire reason for existing.

Independent ownership is the structural enabler that lets both companies do what publicly traded competitors cannot.

Different tactics, shared conviction

• Hamdi frames his decisions around "timeless truths" — constants that outlast any four-year political cycle.
• Ryan limits Patagonia's public positions to areas where the company has 52 years of authentic credibility: environment and climate.
• Both reject anticipatory compliance — self-censoring to avoid retribution — but both are also strategic about where they engage.
• Hamdi collaborated with Ivanka Trump on food-waste reduction and refugee employment before those were politically charged topics; he views the cause, not the partner, as the guide.
• Ryan acknowledges the current administration is retributive and says Patagonia won't weigh in performatively — only where it can be genuinely additive.
• Death threats and boycotts came when Chobani publicly committed to hiring refugees; Hamdi's response was that doing the right thing overrides advice from lawyers and communications teams.

Growth without losing integrity

• Patagonia deliberately restrains revenue growth, treating it as a means to impact rather than the end goal.
• Ryan argues that defining momentum by revenue alone is reductive; Patagonia is still growing, just not chasing every distribution or partnership opportunity.
• Chobani grew ~17–30% annually and now approaches $3 billion in revenue — while making 100% of its products in-house and never selling anything Hamdi wouldn't feed his own children.
• Hamdi's rule for high-growth environments: be physically present. His first five years he never left the factory; when he built the Idaho plant, he lived there for six to seven months.
• Chobani may be the only large independent in the grocery space that grew to number one without being absorbed by a major CPG company.

Ownership structures as values infrastructure

• Every Chobani employee — including line workers, refugees, and immigrants — is a shareholder.
• Patagonia went the opposite direction: founder Yvon Chouinard gave the company away entirely during COVID.
• The Patagonia restructuring had two goals: ensure the company continues to exist with its values intact, and direct cash flow to environmental causes at much larger scale.
• Ryan was brand-new as CEO when Chouinard raised this; he spent a week deliberately ignoring the request before engaging with the process.
• Both structures remove the pressure of diverse external shareholders and protect decisions that would be impossible under conventional ownership.

On immigration, refugees, and the current moment

• Hamdi runs Tent, an organization that encourages companies to hire and train refugees; he visited Mexico recently to continue this work.
• His view on immigration hasn't changed under any administration: functioning agriculture in the US depends on immigrant labor — "everybody knows that."
• When asked how he feels about what's happening to immigrants in the country that gave him so much, he returns to the story of the shuttered upstate New York yogurt factory he revived.
• The 55 workers who lost their jobs when the factory closed saw it as the worst thing that ever happened. Today they say it was the best thing — because what replaced it was far larger and better.
• The lesson: every challenge is an opportunity to build something better than what existed before.

Where each CEO finds hope

• Ryan is genuinely worried about the future of democracy, which he sees as a prerequisite for a healthy planet.
• What gives him hope: time spent in nature, and younger leaders who aren't debating the science — they're just moving forward.
• Hamdi finds hope in the fact that timeless human truths — community, dignity, opportunity — keep reasserting themselves regardless of political noise.