Frozen Yogurts Tangy Little Secret

One of the most popular taste sensations in the frozen yogurt world is the "tart" flavor. Many froyo places, like Pinkberry, run on their tart varieties of frozen yogurt. But there's a dirty little secret about the tart flavor. The tart flavor nearly killed the frozen yogurt industry when it first started.

Soft serve and ice cream have been around for a very long time, and so has yogurt. So it seemed like simplicity to just freeze flavored yogurt and have a similar product to ice cream but with a healthier fat content. Frozen yogurt was available in the 1970's, but didn't take off until the 1980s. Why? Texture and tartness.

Plain yogurt has a natural sour flavor from the cultured milk, and a lot of people do not like the taste of plain yogurt. Even today, if you look at the shelves on a supermarket you'll see lots of serving sized flavored yogurts but plain yogurt only comes in large tubs. When yogurt is frozen, this tart flavor remains.

Also, due to the lower milkfat content of most yogurt, the product wasn't very creamy. Frozen yogurt was consigned to the health nut contingent of America until one company turned the idea of frozen yogurt on its head. That company was TCBY.

The goal of the original frozen yogurt manufacturers was to create a low calorie product that simulated ice cream. The thought of adding sugar to the mix would have gone against the whole purpose of the dessert. Yet, adding the right amount of sugar did two things. First, it cut down that tart flavor, and second, it made the product creamier because the freezing temperature of the yogurt was lowered. Sugar molecules interfere with water molecules forming into ice. This allowed frozen yogurt to be dispensed out of existing soft serve machines.

TCBY found a balance of sugar and yogurt that took away the tartness but didn't blow the calorie count out of the water. The results were staggering. TCBY and other companies made hundreds of millions of dollars off the frozen yogurt boom of the 1980s and 1990s.

Now that frozen yogurt is popular again after a dip in the 2000s, flavor manufacturers took what they learned and tried to make a plainer yogurt flavor again. Now it is the third most popular flavor behind the classic vanilla and chocolate. There's no accounting for taste, eh?