Lifeway Foods: An example of Immigration Success

Kefir is a 2000-year-old product that Marco Polo wrote about and Cleopatra bathed in. An ancient cousin to yogurt, kefir is completely changing the lives of a family of Soviet Union immigrants.

Kefir is a cultured dairy smoothie from Eastern Europe that’s loaded with probiotics and good bacteria that your body needs to maintain a healthy immune system and a regular digestive system.

Lifeway Foods, a company based in Chicago, Ill., became the king of kefir in the United States after the Smolyansky family emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1984 and brought their favorite dairy product with them. Julie Smolyansky is Lifeway’s CEO, and has taken the kefir company to multi-million-dollar heights.

How this cultured milk smoothie became as American as apple pie is a great immigrant success story. Julie’s parents were part of a large wave of Soviet Jews who came to the United States in the late 1970s and ’80s.

“My father heard about life outside the walls of the Soviet Union, and he said, ‘I’m smart, I have these ambitions, and I can’t go anywhere in my country, and I want to create a different life for my children,’” said Smolyansky.

Julie was just a year old when her family packed and left the Soviet Union for Chicago. A few years after her family moved, her father was on a trip to Germany and got a taste of kefir.

“My dad went into a grocery store in Germany and bought three bottles of kefir that he had long missed,” said Smolyansky. “He said that America has everything, but they don’t have kefir, and my mom looked at him and was like, ‘You’re an engineer — make it happen!’”

Julie’s dad used his engineering skills and, with the money he had saved in nine years in the U.S. produced and sold Lifeway’s first bottle of kefir. The drink is made with fermented milk and kefir grains, and the company developed a variety of flavors in addition to plain kefir. Lifeway became the only seller of kefir in the U.S. and grew 30 percent annually, becoming a publicly traded company in 1988. After the company hit $12 million in sales, tragedy struck.

“In 2002, my dad had a sudden heart attack and died on the spot,” said Smolyansky. “He was 55, and it was a real trying time for us personally, and for the business, and for the community.”

Julie’s father had put her in line to run the company. She became the youngest female CEO of a publicly traded company when she was 27 years old.