Inside The Family Drama At Kefir Brand Lifeway

I’m back from a much-needed vacation, with an important investigation publishing while I was away. Did you catch my feature on the chaos at kefir brand Lifeway? It’s a must-read saga, and I’ll give you a taste of why.

Lifeway is a business with a unique backstory:

• In 1976, Julie Smolyansky’s parents Michael and Ludmila fled the Soviet Union (from what is today Ukraine) with their one-year-old daughter. The family of three “defected in the middle of the night” with the equivalent of $116 in their pockets. After three months in Rome as refugees, they settled in Chicago.
• When Michael decided to start a kefir business in America, he convinced his mother back in Ukraine to secretly ship him some of his family’s cultures. She hid the contraband in a roll of women’s stockings.
• But Michael was dreaming bigger. After researching IPOs at his local library and writing his own business plan, he became the first Soviet immigrant to take a company public in America, when Lifeway debuted on the Nasdaq in 1988.
• Lifeway even played a small role in the end of the Cold War. During the Moscow Summit in 1988, President Ronald Reagan gifted a case of Lifeway’s kefir to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev—as proof of what Soviet refugees can accomplish in a free market.
• When Michael died suddenly in 2002 and his then-27-year-old daughter Julie took over as CEO, she became America’s youngest female CEO of a publicly traded company.

But now their American Dream story of success has turned into a nightmare. Recent unsolicited bids from Danone, a longtime investor in Lifeway, are the culmination of years of acrimony between Smolyansky and Danone, which Lifeway accuses of a host of nefarious behavior aimed at undermining the business including blocking the Illinois-based company from expanding internationally and refusing to help it source cheaper raw ingredients. Danone denies these criticisms, and there’s a lot of layers to this story. Smolyansky calls Danone “predatory” and says she believes a Danone takeover could ruin the family business—and recipe—that she’s fought so hard to preserve.

Tell me what you think after reading! Working on it even got me inspired to add more fermented foods like kefir into my diet. Kefir devotees claim a long list of benefits, including from immune support and help with weight loss to improved skin, hair and gut health. And I’ll report, I’ve been enjoying my time on the kefir train so far.

On that note, I’m excited to soon unveil a refresh for this newsletter. I’ll be back with the next edition, featuring the new format, on April 30. Until then, enjoy spring!

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

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The Feed

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Field Notes

A plate of the best lechon I’ve ever had, from my vacation last week in Puerto Rico, what many consider the world’s oldest colony. Here at the iconic lechoneria, El Rancho de Apa, every bite was bliss. As were the accompaniments: beans, rice, escabeche yucca and the coldest Medalla beer maybe ever recorded.

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Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.