I guess TCBY were ahead of their time...

September 2, 2009 11:54 PM

Everywhere I look there's a brand new little self-serve yogurt place with a different but strangely similar name. Pinkberry. Red Mango. Yogurt Circle. Yocup. Sogreen. Freshberry. Yogen Fruz. Tuttimelon. Nubi. One can expect a certain degree of copycatism with food trends, but it seems that there must have been some sort of catalyst for so many of these places to spring up so quickly with such similar products and business models at the same time. What brought this on?
posted by I EAT TAPAS to food & drink (14 comments total)

Yogen Fruz specifically is over 20 years old. 1986 I believe, not too long after TCBY.
posted by sgrass at 12:04 AM on September 3

This blog seems to agree that there has been a recent spate of copycattery. I wouldn't think there needed to be any more of a trigger than the first entrant to the market being visibly successful.

(You've got me thinking about the original flavor Red Cherry now, dang it.)
posted by lakeroon at 12:26 AM on September 3

Pinkberry became very popular with celebrities. Enough paparazzi shots and there's a sense of trendiness and exclusivity. Before expanding, the original California location had lines out the door and caused traffic backups. Some of these other shops got to areas before Pinkberry's expansion did.

I think this is one reason. But as Malcolm Gladwell illustrates in The Tipping Point, there are lots of factors that would come together to make this trend full-blown. The celebrities didn't hurt at all.
posted by cmgonzalez at 12:35 AM on September 3 [1 favorite has favorites]

Possibly some shift in the capital markets related to the economic crisis has made capital more available to that business format? Or maybe just made a business plan along those lines more workable?
posted by XMLicious at 1:53 AM on September 3

Quite a few have been springing up in London - I think part of this is novelty value (as with cupcake stores), part of this being affordable treats doing well in the recession, part of it marketing itself as a healthy alternative to ice cream etc. And what lakeroon said.
posted by mippy at 2:19 AM on September 3

Because people will always buy bowls of sugar if they can be convinced it's healthy for them.
posted by fourcheesemac at 2:44 AM on September 3 [4 favorites has favorites]

Here a Dallas food blog asks, "How Many Damn Frozen Yogurt Places Does This City Really Need?" and gets some guesses at the cause of the trend in the comments.
posted by erikgrande at 6:38 AM on September 3

cmgonzales has it right. This is a trend that began with Pinkberry in LA a few years ago, though as I understand it, Pinkberry itself ripped off the concept from Red Mango which had shops in Asia first.

How did this happen so fast? Well, for one thing, as I just mentioned it's been around for a few years. For another, the one Pinkberry in LA had ridiculously long lines and was making boatloads of money. So it's not a leap to think that there's a market there, and try to tap it. How did we get Barnes & Noble and Borders at about the same time? Or stadium seating movie theaters at the same time? There's a money-making opportunity, and people took it.

Why are there so many different franchises instead of one? Well, Pinkberry and Red Mango were already established before this began, but Red Mango didn't really have a US presence, and Pinkberry was slow to expand. It was a big deal when they opened their second LA shop, but by then others had already started opening up to meet the demand.
posted by kingjoeshmoe at 6:43 AM on September 3

Thanks, everyone. I didn't know that the yogurt wars had been brewing in LA for several years now and then started to branch out -- they all popped up simultaneously where I live this year.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 6:59 AM on September 3

Iceberry was a surprisingly decent chain of bingsu places in Seoul that were especially explosively popular around 2003 or so, spawning many knockoffs.

At some point, around 2005, Red Mango jumped on the bandwagon bowl concept and became the leader of the cold-shit-in-a-bowl concept in Seoul, using yogurt instead of bingsus.

Sometime around 2007, Pinkberry opened in LA/NYC/ETC, ripping off Iceberry's name and Red Mango's concept. To their credit, they were just providing frozen yogurt that wasn't as bombarded with sugar as TCBY or whatever else was, but according to cmgonzalez this caught on like crazy among celebrities--

And now, in 2009, St. Mark's in NYC has about four or five of these places. From punk to Pinkberry, I guess. It's too bad, these generic places -- give me back my NY Milkshake Company and that sleazy porn store!
posted by suedehead at 9:01 AM on September 3

As an L.A. native I can also attest to the fact that the fro yo trend has been going up and down since the early 80s when Penguins Frogen Yozurt ruled the land. A ton of copy cats went up around that and then died off when the coffee shop (Starbucks et al) started up. The frozen yogurt trend in L.A. never really completely died (Big Chill, Penguins have been around since then) but lagged and then expanded again after Pinkberry got big. No doubt it will all happen again.
posted by Sophie1 at 10:04 AM on September 3

The 1992 Simpsons Halloween episode riffs on frozen yogurt.
posted by vickyverky at 11:10 AM on September 3

kingjoeschmoe and suedehead together have the best summary of this interesting tale of frozen yogurt globalization, I reckon.

If you haven't tried the current round of "tart yogurt," you probably don't actually understand this question, by the way. The new stuff is kind of a return to form in that it actually tastes yogurty again, instead of the bland bowdlerized froyo that's just wimpy ice cream for dieters, which is what's been standard since the 90s. The better shops have live cultures in it. Good stuff. Put mochi on it when you get it.
posted by wintersweet at 5:08 PM on September 4

I remember reading about the new tart yogurt trend in this article, it contains a nice little history.
posted by janerica at 6:10 PM on September 4