Anchor Brewing bought by Chobani Yogurt CEO. Here are his plans

The billionaire behind the Chobani yogurt brand has acquired Anchor Brewing Co. with plans to modernize and reopen the historic San Francisco brand that closed last year after 127 years in operation.

Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani founder and CEO, announced Friday that his family office had bought all of Anchor’s assets: the famous steam beer recipes, the 2.1-acre Potrero Hill campus and all the brewing equipment in the De Haro Street warehouses. The price was not disclosed.

The deal marks a new chapter in the turbulent saga of a company that has long been synonymous with its boom-and-bust hometown. Anchor’s signature steam beer fermentation process was a throwback to San Francisco’s blue-collar roots, and the company’s lamented demise in July 2023 seemed yet another setback for a city that had labored to bounce back from the pandemic.

Now that page has been turned. What was old will be new again. San Francisco’s steam beer will flow again from Oracle Park’s bleachers to corner bars in North Beach to dim sum spots in the Outer Sunset. Even the company’s previous logos will be revived.

In an interview with the Chronicle on Thursday night at the St. Regis Hotel, Ulukaya said he would like to get the brewery up and running as soon as he “gets permission from the city and alignment with the community and the people who worked there a long time.” 

“Let’s get back to work. Let’s bring it back to life. I don’t want to sit around,” he said, wearing an Anchor Brewing ball cap. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to get it going in time to make the Christmas ale this year? That would be awesome.”

Ulukaya said he had been “an admirer of San Francisco” but had few connections in the city and “didn’t know Anchor existed” until last August when he happened upon an article in Forbes about its closure. He started researching the company and the role it played in the city’s history. As he got deeper into the story, the shuttering of the brewery reminded him of the origins of Chobani — which he started in a yogurt factory that was about to close in upstate New York. That factory now employs 1,000 of the company’s 3,000 workers.

“I realized how Anchor is really aligned with the city’s history. And I thought, ‘Wow, what if? What if we can bring it back?’ And that excited me because I’ve been part of bringing back a factory in upstate New York and building a brand,” Ulukaya said. 

Many of the details remain to be worked out, Ulukaya said. He said the classic steam beer would be brought back — and the Christmas ale — but that he will seek advice from longtime employees on which other variations are worth reviving.

The brewery will have a significant tasting room, but whether there will be restaurants or shops or other publicly accessible venues remains to be seen. On Thursday, he met with four longtime Anchor employees and said he plans to hire back as many of the former workers as possible. He didn’t know whether the union that formed there shortly before the brewery closed will be part of the new operations.

“Brands like Anchor don’t come that easy. How do you value something like this? Do you value it because it’s been here 127 years?” Ulukaya said. “Do you value it because of how much love and passion goes into creating something like this? The ingredients and knowledge and tradition and yeast and secrets? Do you value it because of how much loyalty people have for it? Or do you value it for how much money it makes?”

He said he enjoys an occasional beer but is not a connoisseur. He knows it’s a tough business.

“It’s a competitive landscape — a lot of beers out there,” he said. “But who cares? From the other perspective you have the people behind it, the history, the recipe, the name and the tradition aligned with this magical San Francisco. There is no value you can put into that.”

Ulukaya met Thursday with Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents the district containing Anchor Brewing, and had dinner with San Francisco Giants CEO Larry Baer. While the initial goal will be to resuscitate the Potrero brewery and get Anchor flowing in the Bay Area, he said he would like to expand distribution as much as possible, which at some point might mean a second brewing facility. 

Ulukaya, 51, was raised in a dairy farming family in a small village in eastern Turkey. After moving to the United States, he founded Chobani in 2005. Five years after the company was formed, it became a billion-dollar brand and one of the best-selling yogurts in the United States.

In addition to the Greek yogurt powerhouse, the company owns La Colombe Coffee Roasters, which it bought in 2023 for $900 million. Both Chobani and La Colombe have two manufacturing plants each, with Chobani in upstate New York and Idaho and La Colombe in Philadelphia and Michigan. “I think Anchor is a brand everyone should have — the people of San Francisco first, but not just the people of San Francisco,” Ulukaya said.

Breed touted the move as a bet on San Francisco and its reputation.

“This is not just an investment in San Francisco. It’s a recognition of what makes our city truly special — our history, our institutions and our people,” she said. “Anchor Brewing has always been a beloved part of San Francisco and thanks to Hamdi Ulukaya, it will be a part of San Francisco for years to come. I’m grateful for his commitment to being a part of the future of our city and for keeping the tradition of Anchor Steam beer being brewed right here where it belongs.”

Ulukaya said the building and equipment at the old brewery seem to be in decent shape.

“I think everything is operational, but we don’t know,” he said. “It’s like a movie — they pressed stop and left. You see boxes on the conveyors. You see bottles on the fillers. You see tickets written halfway. It’s like time stopped. And literally we are going to go and press start and move those conveyors and start it back up.”

While Ulukaya has never brewed beer before, his expertise in yogurt-making could come in handy. 

“I know about fermentation,” he said. “I don’t do fermentation with yeast. I do it with live and active cultures. But I know fermentation. It’s nature’s magic.”

Ulukaya, who has won national awards for hiring refugees at Chobani, said he was not worried about the negativity that has dominated San Francisco’s post-pandemic narrative, although he is aware of the city’s homelessness and poverty issues because he had visited St. Anthony’s, Glide and other nonprofits recently with 80 members of the Chobani leadership team who were in town to meet and volunteer.

Ulukaya said he witnessed “pain and suffering … children without enough food, families struggling and people with mental illness.” 

“There is not success unless everyone is rising,” he said. “The business can play an enormous role in that. It has to be part of the solution. We can’t just rely on the government.”  

He added: “It would be crazy to bet against the rebirth of this city. It’s a gold mine. It’s a treasure. Look at the sea, the mountains and the countryside and the spirit here. Everything you need is here.”