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A History of Greek Yogurt: From Oxygala and Village Cloth Bags to the 1926 Athens Dairy and the American Boom

Writer: Vangelis Pallis
Vangelis Pallis
2 days ago
6 min read

Updated: 24 hours ago

Three different histories hide inside the phrase "Greek yogurt". The first is the history of yogurt itself, which is older than Greece and belongs to the whole band of herding cultures from the Balkans to Central Asia. The second is the history of straining, a preservation craft of villages where milk came from sheep and refrigeration did not exist. The third is the commercial history of a product name, which is barely fifty years old and was written largely in Athens, upstate New York and a London courtroom.


Infographic: timeline of Greek yogurt from the 1926 Athens dairy shop to the 2025 export record
A hundred years of Greek yogurt: timeline 1926–2025.

Before "Greek": fermented milk in the ancient world

Milk left in a warm container sours and sets by itself, and herders somewhere between the Balkans and Central Asia were deliberately making fermented milk by the Neolithic, perhaps around 5000 BC; archaeology cannot pin the place, and the practice probably arose more than once. Classical Greek and Roman writers knew a thick soured milk. Pliny the Elder describes "barbarian" peoples thickening milk into a pleasantly sour food, and the physician Galen, writing in Greek in the second century AD, discusses oxygala (ὀξύγαλα, "sour milk") and notes that it was eaten with honey. That pairing, two thousand years later, is still the national dessert.


The word "yogurt" is not Greek. It comes from Ottoman Turkish yoğurt, usually linked to a verb meaning "to knead" or "to thicken"; the root appears in Old Uyghur texts before 1000 AD and in Mahmud al-Kashgari's eleventh-century dictionary of Turkic languages. Greek adopted it as giaoúrti (γιαούρτι) during the Ottoman centuries, and English first recorded it in the early 1600s.


Straining: a craft of sheep's milk and no refrigeration

Across the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia, yogurt was set in clay or wooden vessels and, where it needed to keep or travel, drained through cloth. Water is what spoils; remove it and the yogurt lasts longer, takes less room and tastes richer. Greek shepherds and village households made strained yogurt from sheep's and goat's milk, hung in cotton bags (the tsantila), and ate set yogurt with its skin from clay pots. The same logic produced labneh in the Levant, süzme yogurt in Turkey and skyr in Iceland. Nobody called it Greek; it was simply yogurt, and the strained kind was straggistó.


The transition from sheep's milk village yogurt to cow's milk industrial yogurt happened in Greece in the twentieth century, as urban dairies grew and cow herds expanded. Today cow's milk dominates Greek yogurt production and sheep's milk yogurt is a premium niche; in 2021 Greece made about 15,000 tonnes of sheep-milk yogurt against hundreds of thousands of tonnes in total.


1926: a dairy shop in Patissia

In 1926 Athanassios Filippou opened a small dairy shop in the Athens district of Patissia, selling yogurt made the traditional way. His sons built it into a wholesale business in the 1950s and in 1964 opened the family's first yogurt factory in a suburb of Athens. The company took the name FAGE (ΦΑΓΕ), which is both an acronym of the Filippou family dairy and the Greek imperative "eat!".


In 1975 FAGE launched Total, a strained cow's milk yogurt in a sealed branded tub with a consistent recipe and shelf life. It was, in effect, the first industrial Greek yogurt: a village product standardised for supermarkets. Exports to the UK began in the early 1980s (sources give 1981 or 1983), and Total slowly built a following in Britain and Italy as "Greek yoghurt", a phrase that for British shoppers came to mean thick strained yogurt from Greece.


1998–2008: America discovers strained yogurt

FAGE's American story begins, by the company's own telling, with a 1998 order of 120 cups from a Greek grocer in Astoria, Queens. Demand among Greek-Americans and then food enthusiasts grew enough that FAGE USA was set up in 2000 and, in 2008, the company opened a plant in Johnstown, New York, so that Total for the American market could be made from American milk. By 2014 Johnstown had capacity for 160,000 tonnes a year.


The decisive event came from outside the Greek industry. In 2005 Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant who had grown up with strained yogurt, bought a Kraft plant that was closing in South Edmeston, New York. In 2007 he launched Chobani, a strained yogurt sold in a wide cup at a price close to ordinary yogurt, placed in the mainstream dairy aisle rather than the speciality section. Americans had never eaten yogurt with 15 g of protein and no gelatin; they bought it in enormous quantities.


2007–2015: half the market in eight years

Greek yogurt was under 1% of US yogurt sales in 2007. Chobani passed US$1 billion in sales by 2010. Danone launched Oikos, General Mills launched Yoplait Greek, Stonyfield and others followed, and by the year to November 2015 Greek yogurt was about 48% of all US yogurt by value, with Chobani alone holding 17.6% of the total yogurt market. Several analysts put the Greek share above 50% by 2017. In less than a decade a Balkan village product had become the dominant form of yogurt in the world's largest consumer market, and the word "Greek" was attached to most of it, whatever the milk's origin.


The boom had side effects. Greek yogurt production in the US reached roughly 771,000 tonnes in 2015, generating around two kilograms of acid whey for every kilogram of yogurt, and a 2013 investigation into where it all went became a minor environmental scandal; see Acid whey: Greek yogurt's byproduct problem.


2013–2019: who may say "Greek"

With the name worth billions, disputes followed. In the UK, FAGE sued Chobani for passing off when the American company entered the British market with "Greek yoghurt" made in New York; the High Court in 2013 and the Court of Appeal in January 2014 found that British consumers understood "Greek yoghurt" to mean yogurt made in Greece, and Chobani had to relabel. In 2017 the European Commission told the Czech Republic that "Greek yogurt" on Czech-made product misled consumers, and in 2019 Czech producers dropped the term. Greece announced plans in 2017–2019 to seek EU geographical protection for Greek yogurt, but as of 2025 no application had been filed, with producers divided over whether a protected name should require Greek milk. In the United States the term remains unregulated. The full account is in Who owns the name "Greek yogurt"?.


2015–2026: the second wave comes from Greece

As the American category matured (industry analysts described Greek demand as having "levelled off" by 2024, with high-protein and drinkable formats taking over), the growth shifted to Europe and to Greek-made product. Greek yogurt exports rose 188% between 2014 and 2020; in 2025 Greece exported about 240,000 tonnes worth €559 million, up 42% in a year, mostly as private label for Italian, British, French and Benelux supermarkets. Kri Kri in Serres, Hellenic Dairies in Trikala and Mevgal near Thessaloniki became the volume producers, FAGE the brand, and "authentic Greek" (made in Greece) a premium segment in Britain growing at 50% a year against slower "Greek-style". A hundred years after the Patissia dairy shop, Greek yogurt is Greece's most valuable dairy export and the country's dairies are spending hundreds of millions of euros on new capacity.


Timeline

Year

Event

c. 5000 BC

Fermented milk in Neolithic herding cultures (location uncertain)

2nd century AD

Galen describes oxygala eaten with honey

11th century

Yoğurt recorded in Turkic dictionaries

1926

Athanassios Filippou opens a dairy shop in Patissia, Athens

1964

First FAGE yogurt plant

1975

FAGE Total launched

early 1980s

First exports to the UK

1998

First FAGE import to the US (Astoria, Queens)

2005

Hamdi Ulukaya buys the South Edmeston, NY plant

2007

Chobani launches; Greek yogurt under 1% of US market

2008

FAGE opens Johnstown, NY plant

2012

FAGE moves holding company to Luxembourg

2013–14

FAGE v Chobani: "Greek yoghurt" must be Greek in the UK

2015

Greek yogurt about 48% of US yogurt sales

2019

Czech Republic drops the term "Greek yogurt"

2025

Greek yogurt exports reach €559 million; Hellenic Dairies buys Dodoni


More on how Greeks themselves eat and think about yogurt in Yogurt in Greek life.


Sources

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