Whatever happened to frozen yogurt?

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, July 11, 2001 | 8:24 a.m.

Most of us recall the not too distant past when frozen yogurt was a healthy and popular fad. There were a proliferation of places to buy these treats, franchises with names such as Heidi's Frogen Yozurt, Columbo, Golden Swirl and TCBY, only the last two of which survive in Las Vegas. Golden Swirl Frozen Yogurt, still operating on Rampart Boulevard and also on West Sahara Avenue, best illustrates the point.

Once there were nine franchises in town. Now there are just two.

But what was once a craze has gone by the wayside, and although the major ice cream makers such as Breyer's, Haagen Dazs, Baskin-Robbins and Ben and Jerry's produce a line of frozen yogurts to compete with their ice creams, they don't sell nearly as well as they once did. The reasons are hard to pinpoint, but there is one salient point upon which most of us do agree: Frozen yogurt doesn't have the rich, creamy taste of premium ice cream.

The nutritional comparisons are interesting. When you compare frozen yogurt with a premium ice cream (defined as one with a butterfat content of 12 percent or less), the caloric content isn't much different, although the frozen yogurt has far fewer fat grams. Some would say a more apt comparison would be that of frozen yogurt with ice milk, although a recent trip to a local Smith's revealed a freezer case filled with frozen treats, but no ice milk whatsoever.

A super premium ice cream such as Ben and Jerry's is different; the yogurt is far less fatty and also far less caloric.

It's interesting to compare the fat and calorie information taken from that company's website. Here are a few comparisons by flavor: A half-cup serving of Cherry Garcia ice cream, bing cherries and chocolate flakes in a sweet cream base, has 260 calories and 140 fat grams. The same flavor frozen yogurt has 170 calories and 30 fat grams.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream has 300 calories per half cup serving, to go with 130 fat grams. The yogurt has 200 calories and 40 fat grams. Chocolate Fudge Brownie, a very popular ice cream flavor indeed, has 280 calories in the ice cream and 130 fat grams, as opposed to 130 and only 20. And so it goes.

Meanwhile TCBY, actually today called TCBY Treats, seems to be thriving. This company is the world's largest manufacturer-franchiser frozen yogurt company, with more than 3,000 stores, including 10 in Las Vegas. The original abbreviation didn't mean "the country's best yogurt," as is the case today. When it was founded in Little Rock, Ark., back in the early '60s, the original meaning was "this can't be yogurt." Later it got the idea to change that.

Elizabeth Smith, communications coordinator for that company, likes to refer to her employer as a "frozen treats" company. The company also produces novelties such as ice cream and frozen yogurt bars and other items. She does concede that frozen yogurt has had a 12-percent decline in sales during the last two years, but she says that no one is overly concerned in her company.

"Consumer preferences shift constantly, and right now, we seem to be in a less health-conscious mode," she says.

Visits to a few purveyors of frozen yogurt were illuminating. Baskin-Robbins features three flavors, a no-sugar-added vanilla, and two premium flavors, one called Raspberry Cheese Louise, which tastes quite a bit like cheesecake, and the other named Maui Brownie Madness, a fudgy confection laden with chewy pieces of a rich chocolate brownie.

A scoop here is a 4-ounce serving, and it develops that in the case of the Maui Brownie Madness, there are 250 calories and 9 grams of fat, only 30 calories less than a serving of their ice cream flavor of the same name.

That sort of reinforces the point that calorie-wise, there isn't much point in eating the yogurt, unless you prefer the taste, or are watching your fat calories. (Just for the record, this is a delicious confection.)

At TCBY Treats, though, you get more options, including a variety of chopped-up candies and cookies (known as mix-ins), and in some of the stores, such as the one found in the Colonnade mall on South Eastern Avenue in Henderson, ice creams and hot Mrs. Fields cookies, too. Definitely not diet foods.

This is soft-serve frozen yogurt, and without doubt a colder, icier product. Eat it too fast and you pay the price. Here there are six flavors, three of them the regular frozen yogurt, which is 4-percent milk fat, one no-sugar-added nonfat product, one sugared nonfat product, and one sorbet, which is both nondairy and nonfat, so technically, not a yogurt at all.

The no sugar added is truly low in calories, only 80 per half cup serving. That is followed by the sorbet at 100, the nonfat frozen yogurt at 110, and last but not least the 96 percent fat-free frozen yogurt (what they euphemistically call the product that has 4 percent milk fat) at a still lean 130 calories.

Among the 96-percent frozen yogurts, Smith said that the far and away No. 1 seller is white chocolate mousse, which is available almost all the time at every store. The yogurt doesn't have a lot of flavor, but it is cloyingly sweet. Better is the vanilla, which is a rich yellow in color and not too far from the taste of premium ice cream.

The chocolate has a nice, chocolatey flavor, but seems less creamy than the vanilla. As to the nonfat flavors, the no-sugar-added flavor, strawberry on my visit, was slushy, more of a drink than a frozen confection, a failure on the part of the refrigeration, not the flavor. The pale-green pistachio had a vaguely artificial flavor, and the last item tasted, a pineapple passionfruit sorbet, was the best of all, fruity and fresh. But it wasn't a yogurt at all, was it?

Personally, give me an ice cream any day.