In the twenty-first-century United States, “yogurt” often means a little fruity treat for women. American Studies scholar Perin Gurel looks at how it got that way.
Gurel writes that the first known writing using the word “yogurt” comes from eleventh-century nomadic cultures of Central Asia. But cultured milk products have been around much longer. Yogurt-like foods, known by many names, are longstanding staples in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Sahara, and Central and South Asia.
Immigrants probably first brought yogurt to the US in the nineteenth century, keeping cultures alive, making batches in home kitchens, and typically eating it as an unsweetened accompaniment to savory food. In 1929, an Armenian immigrant family founded what would become the Colombo brand, selling large containers of plain yogurt as a convenience for fellow transplants from other parts of the world. For native-born Americans at that time, if yogurt was known at all it was a health food with foreign connotations.
Meanwhile, Gurel writes, the Danone yogurt company was founded in early-twentieth-century Spain by an immigrant from the Ottoman Empire. Arriving in the US after World War II with a new Americanized spelling, Dannon began creating sweet, flavored products—starting with vanilla—designed to appeal to native-born white Americans.
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As late as 1972, a Wall Street Journal article identified yogurt consumption with foreign countries including Russia, Turkey, and India. It claimed that “most people really dislike yogurt—at least at first.” (Gurel notes that “most people” here refers to white, middle-class Americans.) The story attributed a rise in American yogurt-eating to hippies and cosmopolitans who appreciated the sour, healthy, foreign stuff, and to manufacturers producing sweet, mild versions that don’t “taste like yogurt.”
Yogurt sales rose by 200 percent over the 1970s, and big food companies like General Mills, Kraft, and Kellogg rolled out their own versions. Low-fat flavored yogurt in particular found favor with dieters looking for “lite” snacks.
Gurel writes that the associations with hippies, dieting, and dessert-like snacks all gave yogurt a feminine connotation. In the decades that followed, marketing campaigns focused on yogurt’s supposed power to satisfy cravings with only 100 calories, keep consumers feeling full thanks to the high protein content, and promote a healthy microbiome. Ads for Yoplait’s dessert-themed single-serving yogurts, launched in 2008, were pulled off the air after activists suggested that they encouraged eating disorders.
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Meanwhile, strained yogurt remained mainly a homemade food in immigrant households until 1998, when FAGE began selling strained yogurt imported from Greece. By this time, regular yogurt had no connotations of foreignness. But the branding of this thicker yogurt relied on a touch of the exotic.
This strategy was particularly effective for the Chobani brand. It was founded by Kurdish-Turkish immigrant Hamdi Ulukaya but marketed as “Greek yogurt.” Gurel notes that, for Americans, Greece has connotations of Mediterranean health while also being viewed as a “white” European nation. “It is foreign enough to be exciting, but not strange enough to be repelling,” she writes.
