I'm not somebody who is going to build something for a few years, sell it, and then go off and just have fun.

I didn't have a business degree. I didn't have experience to work in somebody else's office. I never built or ran a department. So I was on this journey, and when the time came to make a decision, I was just going with my gut.

It's a rare thing to find somebody you can work with, work off of, and have fun with.

I brought in a yogurt master from Turkey. I went to Greece. I was always going back and forth, from New York to Turkey and Greece. The recipe we use has been around hundreds and hundreds of years. Growing up in Turkey, not a day would go by that we wouldn't eat yogurt like this.

I came to the U.S. in 1994 to learn English and go to business school, but I took only a few business courses at the State University of New York at Albany and didn't finish.

Growing up in eastern Turkey, I was not really involved with the family business - sheep and cow farming, yogurt and cheese making. But I think I learned from my father the unspoken business language or instincts that go back thousands of years.