Frozen Yogurt Boom

I've been seeing a lot of Frozen Yogurt shops in California lately. We're talking about stores devoted entirely to serving "fro-yo" made from the same fermented cultures as conventional Yoplait. Frozen yogurt is the new fad. It is cheap and easy to manufacture, in-line with health food culture, individually customizable with different toppings, and like many fermented foods, has a unique taste. The food business model has found a winner. But this isn't going to be like the fruit smoothie fad of 1998 or the pearl milk tea frenzy back in 2001. Each frozen yogurt franchise has a different system going for them.


YogurtLand in Cupertino serves a variety of fruity flavors and sells by the ounce (30 cents/oz), giving you an incentive to chose light weight toppings. The place is usually inundated with Asian high school kids, and the workers are all super fobs.


Swirl, near UC Davis, uses unpasturized yogurt with high levels of live culture, which is supposed to increases its authenticity and nutritional value. This outlet is only 2 blocks away from another shop called "Yogurt Shack", and is within walking distance of "Yolo Berry Yogurt", a new yogurt place that hasn't opened yet.


Red Mango and Pinkberry are two well established yogurt chains founded by Koreans and based in SoCal. Much like pearl tea places, they have a stamp card that gets you a free cup of frozen yogurt after 10 or so purchases. Because they are upscale, fashion minded, and generally more expensive, I don't know much about them, although I think it's pretty interesting that both titles are potent for sexual innuendo. I mean, "Pinkberry"? That's probably a code word in Vegas.