The F&B Brand Leveraging Fitness, Coffee, and...Turkish Football? (HBBIP #139)

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You know, I like to think of How to Build Brands and Influence People as your fat-free Greek yogurt for the creator economy. If you think I’m selling myself short by comparing myself to possibly the least-exciting food imaginable, then I have two things to say to you: thank you, and you’re wrong.

Think about it: I’m the author of the world’s most exciting newsletter, or at least the most exciting newsletter that you’re presently reading, so surely I too must be a pretty exciting guy? Surely no one whose own mother calls him “a nice young man” could be boring!

But what if I told you that almost every day, for my breakfast-lunch combo, I consume a massive bowl of fat-free Greek yogurt?

Well, for those of you who know me, you might say “yep, that scans.” For those of you who don’t, you might call the police. To both parties, and really to anyone reading this, I simply say: join me in Yogurtland. It’s delicious, nutritious, easy to prepare, and HBBIP-approved. What’s not to like?

There is stuff in my yogurt, to be clear. I’m not just mainlining straight-up yog. I put, like, nuts and fruit and occasional nut butters in it, because again, I’m exciting.

So when I say that I’m hyped for today’s brand, you better believe me. After all, it produces something that I eat almost every day—plus, as I just found out, a good deal more things on top of that.

So grab a bowl, a spoon, and your favorite toppings, and get ready for a big heaping helping of…

The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Chobani

Founded in 2005 by Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish-American businessman and die-hard Fenerbahçe fan (this will be important later), Chobani presents a genuinely interesting origin story, and not just for yogurt enthusiasts like me.

What Is Chobani

After two years running a middling feta business, Ulukaya’s life was changed by a piece of junk mail. You see, that little flyer advertised an abandoned yogurt factory, and whereas my unentrepreneurial self would have thrown it away, Ulukaya took action.

Fast-forward twenty years and Ulukaya has a net worth of $13.7B, which is astronomically higher than I would have guessed, but like I told you, people love yogurt. Sure, he’s one of the 300 richest people in the world, but I have this newsletter, so who’s really winning?

But the so-called real world isn’t the only place where Chobani has found smash-hit success; the brand is also killing it with creators.

Let’s see why.

How Is Chobani Performing on Social Media?

It’s not just me who’s been on a yogurt kick recently, folks. The numbers suggest that there are more of us out there—thousands more, in fact.

Chobani Creator Count, 2020 - 2025

Chobani expanded from 1.5k creators in 2020 to 11k creators in 2025, a 7.3x increase over six years. But it wasn’t all clean and easy growth: after a sharp expansion in 2022, the brand contracted in 2023 before rebounding strongly in 2024 and accelerating further in 2025—a pattern that we’ll see repeated to an even more pronounced degree across other metrics.

Chobani Post Count, 2020 - 2025

Chobani’s annual post volume swelled nearly 8x over the past six years, surging from 3.9k posts in 2020 to 31.2k posts in 2025. As you’d expect from 2023’s drop in creator count, post volume also took a hit that year, though both metrics were healthier than ever in 2025.

Chobani EMV, 2020 - 2025

As far as Earned Media Value (EMV), a metric that reflects a brand’s share of viral conversation, Chobani surged from $4.4M EMV in 2020 to $88.5M EMV in 2025, a 20x expansion. As you can see, this is where the growth metrics begin to get pretty impressive, but there’s still more to come.


                                                                                                       Chobani Impressions, 2020 - 2025

Chobani’s impressions expanded from 13.2M in 2020 to just over 1B impressions in 2025, a staggering 77x increase. In other words, Chobani’s impressions growth was 10x greater than its creator count growth, meaning that the brand successfully found a core group of creators who not only love yogurt, but have a lot of followers who love hearing about how much their favorite creator loves yogurt.

I rarely see such an exponential difference between these two ways of measuring audience growth, and it indicates that Chobani’s message is getting through loud and clear.

Chobani Engagements, 2020 - 2025

While engagements didn’t expand quite as dramatically as impressions, Chobani’s totals still climbed from 2.3M in 2020 to 45.8M in 2025, a nearly 20x increase. As with every other metric, the 2023 contraction appears again here, followed by a two-year acceleration phase culminating in Chobani’s most engaged year yet.

When we consider where Chobani’s traction stems from channel-wise, a pretty clear answer emerges, based on May 2025 to April 2026 data:

Chobani Share of Impressions by Platform, April 2025 - March 2026

Instagram dominates impressions, accounting for roughly three quarters of the brand’s total. TikTok contributes ~23%, while YouTube chips in a marginal share.

The pattern plays out once again for engagements, albeit in a more balanced way:

Chobani Share of Engagements by Platform, April 2025 - March 2026

While Instagram leads in total volume, TikTok nearly matches it in engagement contribution, implying comparatively stronger engagement efficiency on TikTok. Notably, however, Instagram also leads TikTok in YoY growth for these metrics, a relative rarity that reconfirms Chobani’s status as an Instagram-first brand.

Who Are Chobani’s Creators?

Now it’s time to meet my fellow yogurt-heads. Who are all these dairy influencers with such excellent taste, and can they turn me on to any new toppings?

1. Like a good parfait, Chobani’s community is both deep and top-heavy.

From May 2025 to April 2026, over 17k global creators drove $122.7M EMV for Chobani. However, just the top 10 creators by EMV accounted for $18.2M, nearly 15% of the brand’s total.

Another aspect of Chobani’s community that stands out is how most of the brand’s growth over the last 12 months has been driven by newcomers. Creators who posted about Chobani from both May 2024 to April 2025 and May 2025 to April 2026 saw their totals across both time periods hold steady at $37.6M EMV and $39.3M EMV, respectively.

However, creators who mentioned Chobani from May 2025 to April 2026 after not posting during the prior 12 months generated a whopping $63.8M EMV.

Some of these top newcomers included meal-prep creator Ashley Lin ($908.4k EMV), baker Ashley Markle ($614.8k EMV), and personal fitness coach Alex Gamble ($613.3k EMV). As a fellow Alex who eats a lot of yogurt, I particularly enjoyed Coach Gamble’s content, though it’s clear across the board that Chobani is carving out an amplified presence on social media thanks to food-focused creators of all stripes.

2. There’s more to Chobani than yogurt

This one shocked and even slightly upset me, but it’s true: Chobani’s most consistent creator cohort might not even be aware of fermented milk’s many joys. They’re more focused on all the many ways to enjoy a different sort of morning pick-me-up.

It didn’t take long to see the signs: from micro-influencers like Donna Loves Coffee ($758.3k EMV) and My Choyce of Coffee ($338.8k EMV) to mid-tier creator Brookelyn Likes Espresso ($199.7k EMV), who I guess isn’t quite as passionate as Donna, Chobani is clearly the creamer and/or milk of choice for a powerful community of smaller-tier creators.

Beyond other food and recipe creators, Chobani has also made inroads with the fitness community, sparking activity from Meerae Moves ($539.1k EMV), Jenna Bariatric Bestie ($436.8k EMV), Health With Hunter ($384.3k EMV), and Ellie Wilson Fitness ($220.9k EMV).

I can personally attest to Chobani’s important role in maintaining a high-protein diet that helps you manage your weight. Basically, I think it’s time that I do for yogurt what Donna’s doing for coffee: the handle ‘alexlovesyogurt’ isn’t taken yet…

3. The Fenerbahçe phenomenon

Looking through the data, all the expected signals are there: foodies, meal preppers, fitness fans, coffee enthusiasts, Turkish football clubs.

Wait, what?

Fenerbahçe is not only Chobani's No. 1 EMV-driver by a wide margin, powering $9.9M EMV, but also accounts for 142 of the brand’s top 1k posts, and a plurality of the leaderboard's top Instagram entries. Meanwhile, beIN SPORTS Türkiye adds another $2M EMV, while Galatasaray contributes $422k. Together, Turkish football entities represent roughly 21% of Chobani’s total top post-level EMV.

Naturally, this activity reflects Chobani’s numerous partnerships with Turkish football clubs, and the brand’s general presence in the Turkish market. No other single vertical—sorry, coffee—comes close to this concentration of impressions.

Look for Chobani’s sports initiatives, and work with athletes and soccer creators, to take center stage over the next month. See, there’s this little thing called the World Cup, and as an official sponsor of Team USA, Chobani is all in. That’s part of why, along with Puma and others, Chobani is on my official list of brands to watch for World Cup impact. I expect big things for the brand’s creator program this summer—look out for the numbers as part of our two-part HBBIP World Cup coverage, launching 6/29 and 7/27.

Overall, these ties to soccer are further proof that for brands like Chobani, there are as many creator identities to court as there are products to sell. To build a truly global creator community, and multiply your impressions by 77x in six years, it pays to tap into the things that people love: football, healthy eating, treats (everybody needs cheat days sometimes), coffee, and above all else, yogurt.

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

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