FroYo

This might not be on everyone’s mind, but from time to time I find myself wondering about frozen yogurt. Do you? Specifically, do you think about how it was really big in the early 1990s and then suddenly it was nowhere and now it seems to be back and no one is acknowledging its former absence? Because I do. I think about that more than I should.

So today I wandered over to the omniscient Wikipedia to see if I could get any confirmation for my thoughts and lo and behold, I’m not completely off base. Turns out, if the article is to be believed, yogurt came to the US in the early 1900s and the frozen variety started to pop up in the 1970s. TCBY opened its first store in 1981. Being that all trends take longer to hit the midwest, I don’t take this as inconsistent with my early 1990s memory of frozen yogurt treat nights. Apparently, the demise of frozen yogurt was due to the Atkins-esque crazes of the late 1990s. So why the resurgence? Something about “probiotic powder-based mixes” and Pinkberry. There you have it. Mystery solved. Kinda.

6 Responses to “FroYo”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address

1 satcla March 12, 2015 at 2:42 pm

OMG I don’t know if you remember, but I was very obsessed with frozen yogurt as well as soft serve. What was the place on University Ave by Sunprint? Yogurt Delight? I loved that one. And Hardee’s comes. I was real into a Hardee’s twist cone. Pinkberry is all the rage in LA. I don’t really get it.
2 Mary Lloyd March 12, 2015 at 4:16 pm

I really had not thought about it but I think you are right.
3 kateandgracie March 12, 2015 at 4:18 pm

S, that one by Sunprint was a fave of mine too! I was also thinking about (and researching) how Dairy Queen used to make Breezes, which were their Blizzards, but with FroYo. And then, poof! They were gone. I swear I went into a TCBY win Corpus once and there was no yogurt, but I can’t find confirmation for that.
4 Terry March 12, 2015 at 8:19 pm

Maggie loved TCBY. And now loves all cute frozen yogurt shops everywhere. I wonder what her take on this absence and resurgence is.
5 Sara March 16, 2015 at 9:46 am

I don’t know what it was like back in the day, but we’ve got a new shop in Oregon (OFroYo) and I am delighted by the DIY aspect. I can make a small dish with as many snickers bits as I want. But as far as I know, they don’t offer probiotic powder.
6 kateandgracie March 16, 2015 at 10:24 am

Yeah, the probiotic explanation didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Isn’t yogurt inherently probiotic anyway? Toppings and DIY seems like it could lead only to success.