Tart frozen yogurt chains cultivate a dedicated urban followingTart frozen yogurt chains cultivate a dedicated urban following

Bret Thorn

What some people are calling “The Third Coming” of frozen yogurt is happening in New York and Los Angeles, but the jury is still out on whether this infatuation with a newer, high-tech version of a product that fizzled in the early 1980s will blossom into a love affair.

The charge of a new, tart style of yogurt is being led by Pinkberry, a Los Angeles-based chain that debuted in 2004 and now has 24 units there and four in New York. It offers just two flavors—plain and green tea—that can be topped with an array of fruit, cereal, nuts and candy, with prices ranging from around $2.50 for an unadorned 5-ounce cup of plain yogurt to about $9.45 for a 13-ounce green tea yogurt with three toppings. Prices vary by location.

Pinkberry reportedly was inspired by Korean concepts such as Red Mango, whose first U.S. branch is in Los Angeles and whose website maps out future locations in Las Vegas, New York and the Seattle area.

The dominant player has, in turn, inspired independent startups both in New York and Los Angeles. And tart frozen yogurt is being found on menu boards at other concepts as well.

Öko, a yogurt-and-tea shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., that offers a variety of frozen yogurt flavors, reports that what it calls its original Greek-style tart yogurt, $3.75, is its best seller.

“Right now it’s doing extremely, extremely great,” says manager Kenyatta Ibrahim.

At Dominick’s, an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, chef Brandon Boudet took inspiration from Pinkberry and combined a thick, Greek-style yogurt with honey and spun it in his ice cream maker.

Sweetgreen, a takeout restaurant that opened in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown in late July, offers salads using as many organic ingredients as possible, and a tart frozen-yogurt dessert.

The restaurant was opened by four classmates who graduated from Georgetown University this past spring and determined that those two items dovetailed with how their peers wanted to eat.

“Those two elements fit together,” says partner Nicolas Jammet. “It’s a great way to eat—very healthy, but it still feels like you’re eating a full meal.”

His yogurt is a blend of nonfat yogurt, skim milk, about five grams of sugar per serving and a few other items. He and other tart frozen-yogurt sellers report that strawberry is the most popular topping, although mango sells well, too.

At Sweetgreen, organic blackberry is popular, but Jammet says that is likely because it is the only consistently organic fruit that they get.

Still, skeptics wonder if a tart yogurt with few flavor options will make it in the heartland.

“I think it’s probably a fad that’s going to last about a year or so,” says Malcolm Stogo, an ice cream consultant based in West Orange, N.J. “The flavor profile is pretty weak. Right now it’s very, very trendy in New York and Los Angeles, but it’s a very limited market.”

He predicts that this type of yogurt might spread to a few other cities—Chicago, Boston, Miami—but that’s where it will stop.

Ching Hsieh, a spokeswoman for Pinkberry, says the company has plans to open units in Phoenix, Miami and Dallas, in addition to more restaurants in New York. Overseas expansion will begin with London’s Canary Wharf, she adds.

Steven Young, a Houston-based consulting dairy and food technologist, says frozen yogurt first appeared in the mid- to late-1970s as a palate-cleansing substitute for midcourse sorbets.

“It was very, very tart, and it sort of did the job,” he says. “But the interest in it started to grow.”

It started to become more mainstream, challenging the position of ice milk and sherbet, which at the time were the lower-fat alternatives to ice cream.

But yogurt’s tartness meant that it didn’t mesh well with “nonacid” flavors like vanilla and chocolate, which Young says makes up 70 percent or more of anyone’s ice cream product line. So within a few years it had virtually vanished from the picture.

Then, he says, in the mid-1980s, frozen yogurt was reformulated to be less tart, more chocolate-friendly, and chains like TCBY and I Can’t Believe it’s Yogurt arrived on the scene.

“For a period of maybe as many as 10 years or so, this stuff was really rockin’,” Young says, with annual consumption doubling or even tripling.

Then in the mid-1990s the dairy industry convinced regulatory authorities to eliminate standards for ice milk, allowing for the use, instead, of terms like reduced-fat ice cream.

“So people who needed to have low-fat jollies in this type of dessert bailed and went to low-fat ice cream,” Young says. Frozen-yogurt sales slowed and have been essentially flat since the early 2000s, he says, so that now 90 percent of all frozen desserts are some sort of ice cream.

Lynda Utterback, publisher of The National Dipper Magazine in Elk Grove Village, Ill., which covers the frozen-dessert industry, sees this frozen-yogurt craze as being similar to the one in the 1980s.

“It’s the same thing coming back again,” she says. “I think it’s going to stick around for a little while, but it’s going to go away again.”

She says that major department stores and supermarkets are selling it, and Young confirms that packaged yogurt sales saw an uptick in the past year. It’s a small uptick—about 2 percent, which is about how much ice cream sales can fluctuate in a given year—but it is the first sign of life in the industry in quite awhile.

And this time around, better technology is available, Young says. Faster, lower-temperature freezing results in the formation of smaller crystals and thus a smoother texture that mimics higher-fat frozen desserts. New higher-pressure extrusion processes allow for packaging of those products while keeping them extremely cold.

Research is also underway to develop a new generation of hydrocolloids, or gums, to create smoother textures.

Young acknowledges that it’s too early to tell whether this generation of frozen yogurt is a trend or a fad.

“I’m a big believer that where there’ smoke, there’s fire,” he says. “But it can be good fire or bad fire.” The current craze in Los Angeles and New York could burn itself out, “or you could have the next Starbucks.”

The scoop on unexpected ice cream in sweet and savory new flavors

Pasadena Calif., —recently got a Pinkberry unit, but a local resident reports three gelato shops opened in a just a few months before that.

The frozen-yogurt craze of the late 1980s was accompanied by a premium ice cream fad that included brands such as Ben & Jerry’s and Steve’s. —recently got a Pinkberry unit, but a local resident reports three gelato shops opened in a just a few months before that.

This time around, gelato and other premium ice cream concepts are opening in tandem with tart yogurt shops. Two—Sucré, which is a complete pastry shop, and La Divina Gelateria—opened recently on a single block on Magazine Street in New Orleans’ Garden District. —recently got a Pinkberry unit, but a local resident reports three gelato shops opened in a just a few months before that.

Former Lycos executive Jan Horsfal has opened Gelazzi, a gelateria with one unit each, so far, in Denver and Fort Collins, Colo. —recently got a Pinkberry unit, but a local resident reports three gelato shops opened in a just a few months before that.

Chocolate and vanilla remain favorites, but Sucré customers have developed a penchant for pastry chef-owner Tariq Hanna’s coconut-basil ice cream. —recently got a Pinkberry unit, but a local resident reports three gelato shops opened in a just a few months before that.

At North Pond Café in Chicago, executive chef Bruce Sherman is making a sweet-corn ice cream dessert this summer to go with a chilled, poached Michigan peach with ginger ale gelée. —recently got a Pinkberry unit, but a local resident reports three gelato shops opened in a just a few months before that.

At Blackbird, also in Chicago, pastry chef Tim Dahl serves bacon ice cream with a beignet stuffed with bay-and-fig jam, made by infusing cooked bacon in milk and then adjusting the fat ratio with added bacon fat. His chocolate polenta is served with caramel corn ice cream, which has roasted sweet corn passed through a chinois and mixed with a caramel base. —recently got a Pinkberry unit, but a local resident reports three gelato shops opened in a just a few months before that.

We’ve been talking about making a lobster ice cream that might go with a savory course, he says. “But if you ask half the chefs here their favorite flavor, it’s vanilla.” — Bret Thorn —recently got a Pinkberry unit, but a local resident reports three gelato shops opened in a just a few months before that.