Yogurt’s Big Move

Frozen yogurt is back. And customers are craving it more than ever.

I’m the only person I know who began eating yogurt from a little wooden box.

It was the 1950s, and the contraption was the electric incubator my dad had rigged up in the garage. Its principle was simple. Place a bowl of milk inside with a small dab of yesterday’s batch, insert the makeshift thermostat to keep the temperature just right for yogurt-bearing bacteria, plug the whole thing into a light socket and in less than 24 hours you had a bunch of creamy white goop ready to be eaten with pleasure and ease.

So you can imagine my consternation when, 25 years later, the frozen yogurt craze began. Now everyone else was into yogurt, too. The truth, of course, was that what others called yogurt to me wasn’t yogurt at all. It was an overly sweet, sugary, colored dessert-like mess topped with odd bits and pieces of things designed to mask what little true-yogurtness remained. It was, in other words, a crass attempt to capitalize on my family secret by revealing it to the world in bastardized form.

Utterly disgusted with this new development, I turned my back on yogurt—frozen and otherwise—for years. Eventually, in fact, I almost forgot that the stuff had ever existed.

But today I bear glad tidings: Yogurt is back! It is the dawn of a new age; the thaw is finally over.

The story of yogurt is old: Most likely first fermented spontaneously by wild bacteria living on goat-skin bags, the earliest yogurt is believed to have been carried into Europe by the nomadic Bulgars who began migrating there in the second century and eventually settled in the Balkans.

Its consumption by early Turks is recorded in many books. The first written account of a European encounter with the ancient dish, however, occurs in French clinical history: To cure an upset stomach, a Turkish doctor allegedly prescribed yogurt as a remedy.

Indeed, its health benefits are legendary.

Containing live probiotic bacterial cultures, yogurt aids in digestion by helping to maintain a healthy balance among the 200-plus other kinds of bacteria living in our stomachs and intestines. It also has been investigated for possible roles in everything from improved immune function to the reduced risk of certain kinds of cancer.

Flash forward now to the early 1980s. A whole new generation of entrepreneurs stands poised to start selling yogurt, in its frozen form, to a whole new generation of consumers newly enamored with healthy foods, but relatively unfamiliar with their earthly charms. The one major obstacle to overcome is most people don’t like the culture’s tart taste. The solution: Dress it up to taste more like ice cream.

“If you go way back it was really an alternative frozen treat with less fat and fewer calories than ice cream,” says David Hall, vice president of marketing for TCBY, which pioneered the field by, among other things, marketing its product under a set of initials that originally stood for This Can’t Be Yogurt. “Our whole premise was, ‘Wow, this is so good you can’t believe it’s yogurt,’” Hall says.

The trick worked. Frozen (sweetened) yogurt became a catchword of the 1980s and ’90s with sales reaching $25 million in 1986 at growth rates in the triple digits. The market continued soaring at more than 200 percent a year until the early 1990s when it comprised roughly 10 percent of the country’s market in frozen desserts.

Then came a lull. Frozen yogurt had become a icon of American culture, true, but as the country’s love affair with health foods swooned toward marriage and purveyors like Cold Stone Creamery began fighting back with whole new lines of healthier reduced-fat ice creams, customers started falling away. In 2005 65 million gallons of frozen yogurt were produced in the U.S.—a significant decline from 15 years before when 117.6 million gallons had been made

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That’s when Pinkberry came along. Founded by immigrants from South Korea, where tart-tasting frozen yogurt has been popular for years, the little company that could opened its first store in Los Angeles in 2005. The idea quickly spread, attracting such competitors as Red Mango, an older company that actually started in South Korea but didn’t make it to the U.S. until 2007.

Just within the past year retail yogurt sales have increased at least 33.4 percent. Frozen yogurt is also doing exceedingly well, with a 12 percent increase since 2006. And, according to a report by market researcher Packaged Facts, frozen yogurt sales are expected to jump from $1.7 billion to nearly $2.7 billion over the next five years.

Many attribute that, in part, to the public’s belated acceptance of the original tart flavor by which true yogurt has always been characterized.

“The market in the U.S. is finally accepting frozen yogurt that actually tastes like yogurt,” Aaron Serruya, co-founder of Yogen Fruz, which has more than 250 stores in 35 countries, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “Before it was always yogurt masked as ice cream,” says Jonathan Cutler, spokesman for Cefiore, which launched its first store in 2006 and now has 25 locations with plans for another 24–40 in the coming year.

Cefiore, owned by South Koreans but based on a formula from Italy, offers four basic flavors: original, acaiberry, chocolate, and green tea. All are tart.

People come in and ask for it,” says Mariana Salazar, who fills cups from a soft-serve machine. “Some come in three times a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; they go crazy for it.”

On the rare occasions that supplies run low, assistant manager Gordon Herman adds, “customers get very irritated because they can’t get their yogurt.”

The market in the U.S. is finally accepting frozen yogurt that actually tastes like yogurt. Before, it was always yogurt masked as ice cream.”

Not everyone, of course, is a convert.

“It’s not good,” says a 21-year-old customer named Brittany who declined to give her last name. “Yogurt is usually a dessert, and this is way too tart.”

Her solution: Stick with the more familiar sweet yogurt also available at the store.

The divide between sweet and tart, in fact, sometimes comes between families. “This is for me and this is for my kids,” explains Paula Loftus, walking away with two separate bags. While she loves plain tart yogurt, Loftus’ three children—age 10, 14, and 17—don’t share her taste. “They like vanilla, chocolate, and coffee,” she says.

Other families don’t suffer from such generational divisions. Some even claim that their children—who, unlike many parents, grew up with frozen yogurt­—are leading the way. The taste for tart, in fact, seems to traverse age and cultural lines; Alberto Medina, 74, says he eats it regularly at home.

“We use it instead of sour cream,” Medina says.

“I just came by one day, tried it, and thought it was really good,” explains Amy Niemeyer, 17, enjoying a helping of peach. “I like plain yogurt; it’s not as sweet and tastes more natural.”

Her 18-year-old friend, Ashley Meyer, suggests adding a fruit topping. “It tastes like sweet-and-sour,” she says.

The time for hesitation is through. Taking a deep breath, I march up to the counter looking the man behind it straight in the eye. No strawberry, peach, or blueberry for me; I am going directly to the source.

“Give me plain yogurt,” I say. “No toppings.” Maybe chocolate, my favorite.

Yogurt is definitely back.

“This probably wouldn’t have worked 20 years ago,” Cutler says. “People’s tastes are evolving. This is back to the basics of what real yogurt’s about. I call it the new millennium of interest in frozen yogurt, but really it’s retro.”

Tyler Bargas, sales director at YoCream International Inc., a leading manufacturer and marketer of frozen yogurt products, agrees. “Yogurt is back,” he says. “It’s always been entrenched in the economy, but it kind of flattened out and now there’s a big resurgence. It’s not a hippie food anymore.”

Leading the charge, Bargas says, are the tart-tasting products that have finally been embraced by a generation of consumers that have either never tasted them before or once rejected them but are now more open-minded.

“Tart yogurts are growing exponentially,” Bargas says.

His company recently reported a 23.3 percent sales increase for the quarter ending January 31, 2008, its seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

“The interest seems to be percolating,” Bargas says. “We expect tart to surpass our sales of strawberry. What’s changed is the consumers’ level of education. They know what yogurt is now. Even my kids reach for yogurt.”

While some establishments offer such enhancements as chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, or green tea, the underlying tartness of the yogurt is distinct and unmistakable, with most customers preferring the undisguised original or plain flavor.

“We try to make all our flavors still taste like yogurt,” says Matthew Wallace, co-owner of BerryLine, which opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2007. “We pick flavors that go well with the tartness of the yogurt; if we have pomegranate, we want it to taste like plain yogurt with a little bit of pomegranate in it. I’ve had several people come in and say it tastes just like the Greek yogurt their mom used to make.”

While most customers have an immediate positive reaction, he says others aren’t so sure at first. “Only a few have gone ‘Eeww’ and walked out,” Wallace says. “But then even they often come back saying, ‘You know, after thinking about it, it doesn’t actually taste so bad.’ The yogurt phenomenon,” Wallace says, “is definitely satisfying and surprising.”

Eden Burch, manager of a Dolci Mango in San Diego, has a straight forward explanation. “The taste,” she says of the tart yogurt her store sells, “is simple but addicting. They’re surprised when they taste it, but mostly it’s a good surprise.”

That certainly seems to be the case at Golden Spoon in Long Beach, California, where plain tart yogurt is in high demand.