Making the next generation of frozen yogurt

The frozen yogurt category is getting its second wind. Today’s product is more acidic, and some consumers prefer a sour or tart taste. But the bigger market is for creamy, indulgent frozen yogurt. Here are tips and ideas for working with flavors.

Lifeway products — At Natural Products Expo West in March, Lifeway introduced a 99% lactose-free and gluten-free frozen yogurt. Greek Style Fro-Yo is available in three flavors: Blood Orange Swirl, Chocolate Swirl and Honey Swirl. A serving has 110 calories, 1 gram of fat and 6 grams of protein.

Red mango frozen yogurt — The Red Mango frozen yogurt chain has a new Classics line in all-natural flavors that are sweet and creamy. Classics flavors include Cake Batter, Milk Chocolate, Peanut Butter and Sugarcane Cola.

Virginia Dare frozen yogurt — Frozen yogurt combines multiple health hooks into a single appealing package, says Anton Angelich of a Brooklyn-based flavor company. "It parallels the popularity of probiotics and prebiotics."

Refrigerated Greek yogurts served up the flavor inspirations for the Ruggles Lowfat Greek Frozen Yogurt line from Dairy Enterprises Inc. Flavors include vanilla bean, peach, honey and blueberry. The yogurt is sold in pints and single-serving 4-ounce containers.

As an added advantage, consumers accept these fruits. The same can’t always be said for noni berry or açaí, which are relatively unknown to consumers, Angelich said. “It’s to the point that they think, ‘I’m not going to spend that much in this economy on something that I don’t know I’m going to like.’”

Of course, flavorists have ways of circumventing consumer reluctance. As Paulette Haber, Angelich’s colleague and director of marketing communication and research at their company, notes, “When kiwi was first introduced, it was paired with strawberry. Now kiwi can sometimes stand alone.” Another example is how peach tamed mango. Mango, like many tropical fruits, has a distinct sulfur note. It took the pairing to tamp down what would’ve been an unacceptable profile.

Decadence redefined

Superfruit flavors are well and good when you want to highlight a healthy halo. But for many fro-yo aficionados, it’s all about the decadence. On this side of the flavor spectrum, Gumabon said, “We have worked with many frozen yogurt manufacturers in developing not just fruit bases, but chocolate bases, nut bases, dessert-type bases and many others.”

Doing so may not be as straightforward as it seems, given frozen yogurt’s underlying tart profile. That’s why working with chocolate is so challenging. As Angelich explained, “Chocolate is alkaline. When alkaline and acid come together, you get something that’s neither. That’s probably one of the reasons that you don’t see a lot of chocolate refrigerated yogurt on the market. The pHs just don’t work.”

Onsite yogurt purveyors can overcome this incompatibility by leaning on toppings to deliver decadence outside the constraints of a tangy yogurt profile.

“You see all kinds of chocolate and candy toppings, cake pieces, cookie mix-ins and inclusions,” Angelich said. “These make even a tart frozen yogurt more comparable to an indulgent dessert or an ice-cream sundae.”

Flavor accents can also turn an otherwise standard profile into something more sensorily sinful. Instead of straight lemon, there is lemon meringue pie. There is apple cobbler, Key lime pie and cherry tart. “You’re putting in an accent to gain greater hedonic acceptance — maybe adding a crust or pastry note, or a cinnamon crumble to the profile,” Angelich said.

Van Horn and Gunter of Honey Hill Farms don’t just add notes of crust or crumble; nor do they leave operators the sole option of adding or mixing in inclusions at the point of service at the store. By pioneering what they call their “bulky flavoring system,” their products incorporate fruit purees, cookies, flavor droplets, nuts and other inclusions right into the liquid yogurt base. From an operational standpoint, the system represents a real shift.

Soft-serve yogurt has to be designed to go through a soft-serve machine, Van Horn explained. “The simple way to do that is with extract flavoring. It’s easier to handle, you don’t have viscosity issues, you don’t have variegates that could clog up a soft-serve machine and it’s cheaper to do.”

But it doesn’t provide the same sensory experience of actually biting into a pretzel piece or chunk of cake batter. The trick to doing so in a soft-serve format is designing the inclusions to be small enough to fit through the operator’s equipment, but not so small that they disappear, Van Horn said.