Chobani

Learn how America’s No. 1 yogurt brand uses Outtake to secure their digital footprint and stop fraud campaigns at the source.

“Outtake empowers us to take control of our brand presence on social media. It feels so good to be able to take down fraud and then report back to leadership that misinformation campaigns are trending down.”

About

Chobani is a food maker with a mission of making high-quality, nutritious food accessible to more people. Founded in 2005 by Hamdi Ulukaya, an immigrant to the U.S., Chobani has grown into America's No. 1 yogurt brand. The company manufactures products in New York, Idaho, Michigan, and Australia, which are available throughout North America and distributed in Australia and other select markets.

Challenge

Protecting brand perception from coordinated misinformation campaigns

Chobani has grown exponentially in recent years, claiming a 20% market share and becoming the top-selling yogurt brand in the U.S. This success has brought the company plenty of positive media attention. It’s also made them vulnerable to public scrutiny.

Eventually, Chobani found themselves in the same position as virtually all CPGs: the target of pending litigation around the product category. When news of this litigation started circulating, a wave of settlement apps built to help people find and file class action claims emerged. These apps soon began paying microinfluencers to share scripted messages encouraging Chobani customers to download and cash in.

“Our target demographic relies on UGC content to decide what products to buy or what to feed their kids,” explains a product manager at Chobani. “To preserve people’s trust and protect the credibility of genuine customer content, we have to shut down these paid microinfluencers as quickly as possible.”

But the volume and complexity of online chatter about Chobani was no match for their team’s manual detection methods. Although they routinely swept major attack surfaces for threats, more sophisticated video and audio content often flew under the radar until it had gained traction.

Plus, false trails were everywhere. Between general brand mentions, legitimate coverage of the litigation, and posts from confused customers simply asking questions, it was hard to zero in on the truly bad actors.

When the team did find suspicious content, they were never sure of its severity. There was no reliable way to track how far or how often a piece of misinformation was spreading, or whether an isolated incident was actually part of a coordinated campaign.

This lack of data made it challenging for the product team to answer leadership’s questions about whether public sentiment was genuinely shifting. “They always wanted to know how worried they should be, but I could rarely give them a straight answer,” the product manager shares.

To protect Chobani’s reputation from these fraudulent campaigns, the team needed to bring in reinforcements. Specifically, they needed a platform that could drill down on brand sentiment at the narrative level and quickly zero in on the most harmful threats.

There was only one solution for the job: Outtake.

“Like pretty much every major CPG, we’re often the target of coordinated campaigns. We needed a way to track what people were saying on social media, and how much of that content was coming from paid promoters running the same script.”

Solution

24/7 threat detection and sentiment tracking with a next-gen digital trust platform

Outtake gives Chobani the narrative intelligence they need to detect and dismantle misinformation campaigns at scale.

To kick off the partnership, Outtake level-set with the product team about Chobani’s brand guidelines and risk priorities, reviewing sample alerts to understand their enforcement preferences. From there, Outtake tailored their system to eradicate the most pressing threats to Chobani’s reputation.

A month later, the team had already used the platform to meaningfully reduce the volume of misinformation campaigns. “It’s so intuitive that we saw results fast,” the product manager adds.

Today, nothing gets past Chobani. They identify threats everywhere they hide: in logos, images, videos, audio, as well as traditional keyword-based formats.

Threats are trackable in the Outtake platform, but the team also receives prioritized risk digests in their inboxes every day. These recaps organize signals by theme, from discussions of Chobani product launches to conversations around the product claims, making it easy to separate real threats from harmless noise.

The digests don’t stop at identifying the threats, either. They show which surfaces each one has spread to, how much traction it’s gotten, and whether it’s a one-off or part of a full-blown campaign amplifying the same talking points. One digest, for example, spotted shared scripts coming from a single company that was running a coordinated UGC campaign across multiple CPG brands, not just Chobani. To the product team’s relief, most negative noise is traced back to paid actors, a crucial distinction that proves legitimate customers still trust the brand.

While Outtake provides a takedown recommendation for every threat, complete with the supporting documentation and logic behind it, the Chobani team still has the power to decide whether to move forward. If Outtake suggests removing a post from a confused customer echoing a claim from a microinfluencer, they typically override the recommendation, opting instead to reach out to the person directly and educate them. Meanwhile, they swiftly shut down paid promoters.

In fact, they’ve taken down misinformation campaigns across four social media platforms. And, thanks to Outtake’s direct connections to these platforms, they remove outcome-eligible threats with a 98% success rate.

Beyond equipping the team to neutralize the most insidious campaigns, Outtake enables them to track brand sentiment over time. In the platform, they monitor the split of positive, neutral, and negative sentiment across all Chobani mentions. Then, they measure the volume of specific negative themes week-over-week against a four-week average to see whether they're escalating, flat, or fading.

“Outtake’s brand sentiment insights are so good,” the product manager says. “They’re flagging shifts that even our social listening tools didn’t catch.”

So, when leadership asks how the claims circulating online are impacting people’s trust, they no longer hesitate. They point leaders directly to the data showing brand sentiment trending in the right direction.

“Outtake enables us to drill down on every single threat to our brand image, by specific theme or narrative. This granular visibility has been incredibly valuable for understanding the severity of attacks and neutralizing them before they do actual damage.”

Results

Better control over brand sentiment, more takedowns, and a long-term risk protection partner

With Outtake, Chobani sharpened their narrative intelligence to safeguard their industry-leading status. Now, they immediately identify any bad actors or misinformation campaigns looking to exploit that status.

Best of all, Chobani’s just getting started with Outtake. They’re especially excited to expand the use case from managing fraud to capitalizing on positive and organic consumer sentiment. As Chobani launches new products, Outtake’s insights will be useful in helping the innovation team source superfans and influencers to partner with.

“Now that we don’t have to be on the defensive quite as much, I’m excited to use Outtake to track the more positive side of brand sentiment too. It’s going to be so useful for getting a pulse on how people are responding to new launches and other initiatives.”

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