Escape From Yogurt Mountain, by Brian Oliu

Listen when I tell you this:  frozen yogurt is the most important dessert in our lifetime—perhaps anyone’s lifetime.  Pay no attention to the claims that the mini- donut caused the ‘pink is the new black’ movement after Diana Vreeland had its tricky white powder cascade down her black Oleg Cassini during a Vogue editor’s meeting.  Ignore the cries that the Black-And-White Cookie promoted segregation or that it ended Jerry’s non-vomit streak dating back to June 29, 1980.  Carrot cake?  Please.  Frozen yogurt is as American as apple pie—in a hundred years when soldiers are asked why they are fighting the Martians (or Russians!  Or Chinese!). Uncle Sam’s boys will rousingly respond “for Mom and frozen yogurt and freedom and flying cars,” and we will cheer.

For the war we are fighting in the future will be in fact dictated by this frozen treat, this creamy combination of milk solids, milk fat, yogurt culture, gelatin, and beet sugar.  Though to be fair, America’s love of frozen yogurt is fickle and locust-like:  its popularity is on a seventeen-year cycle.  When introduced in the 1970s as a healthy alternative to ice cream, Americans rightfully frowned upon the creation.  It tasted, well, like yogurt that you put in the freezer:  tart and with that oh so familiar gloppy texture.  One could see how this would not be appetizing to just about anyone, even health nuts.  If frozen yogurt was to be an alternative to ice cream, it would have to be just like ice cream, and so manufacturers started to experiment with not only recipes but presentation:  sprinkles/jimmies (depending on your geographical region of course, but that’s another essay), waffle cones, and crushed up candy bars.  In 1986, frozen yogurt sales were $25 million.  By the early 90s, frozen yogurt was 10% of the dessert market.  (I should take a moment to say I love that there is a dessert market—was this information published in Dessert Magazine?  Did they use a pie chart?)  We loved the stuff.  We called it FroYo (I did not call it FroYo).  We called it Frogurt (I did not call it Frogurt).  We called it Frozyog (erroneous).

The frozen yogurt craze died off during the latter half of the 90s as well as the early 2000s, perhaps due to our obsession with decadence—ice cream became the vice of the times.  A classic, certainly.  Our desserts need to be as rich as we are.  This brings to mind Manhattan restaurant Serendipity’s “Golden Opulence Sundae”, an ice cream sundae covered in 23-karat gold leaf and topped with caviar: all for a thousand dollars.  No word on the nutritional facts of said sundae, but let’s be honest: when you are rich calories are inconsequential.   In 2004, premium and super premium ice creams were on the rise while lower-fat desserts like frozen yogurt, water ice, and sherbet dipped (as did Dippin’ Dots, ice cream flash frozen in liquid nitrogen which is marketed as ‘The Ice Cream of the Future”).

Part of this blame needs to be pinned on the suppliers of frozen yogurt, and the biggest name in the frozen yogurt game is TCBY, or “The Country’s Best Yogurt”.  (Note:  while I will refer to TCBY by its initialism, it is great fun to refer to the chain by its full name and refuse to acknowledge its abbreviation.  It also makes dates with your sweetie sound much more impressive.)  Founded in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1981, TCBY was easily the most successful frozen yogurt franchise in the world, and even today dominates the frozen yogurt market.  While successful, it was expensive compared to ice cream shoppes—while there will probably never be a frozen yogurt dessert as glorious as the Golden Opulence Sundae, frozen yogurt falls under a category I like to call the “common bourgeois”, expensive absurdities that everyone purchases:  other examples include sushi, pita chips, and cappuccino.  TCBY had a glorious rise to fortune (the tallest building in Arkansas was called the TCBY Tower until 2004.  Think about that for a second.  Hillary Rodham Clinton was on the board of directors until her husband took the presidency.  Think about that for two more seconds.) but was being quickly deserted in the dessert war desert—the one time 1.6 billion dollar company was sold for $140 million in 2000.  After the buy out, TCBY changed their business practices:  prices were slashed and the menu expanded to include yogurt protein shakes as well as a focus on the beneficial elements of yogurt, such B-vitamins and bacteria cultures.

But despite TCBY’s resurgence on the national frozen yogurt scene, there is a war that is about to be waged, and it is here where the future of frozen yogurt and the future of our people will be determined.  Here, of course, is Tuscaloosa, Alabama, my home for the past five years.  The battle for frozen dessert supremacy has picked a perfect battlefield: a city of around 91,000 in the second-fattest state in the union with a state university with an undergraduate enrollment of 21,000 and rising.  If there is a yogurt defense force, the Tuscaloosa landscape would be the final examination in their virtual training simulator.

Now, I could discuss the other frozen dessert factors but that would seem inconsequential:  there is a Cold Stone Creamery next to campus that is relatively successful as well as a Dippin Dots (again, the Ice Cream of the Future!) standalone franchise in what looks like a decrepit carnival tent.  All of these places cower in the terror shadow that is Yogurt Mountain.

Yogurt Mountain is an Alabama-only franchise with locations in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.  It is not, in fact, a mountain.  It is not a secret-level in Super Mario World.  No, Yogurt Mountain is much larger than these things.

Yogurt Mountain looks like the inside of a crazy Romanian billionaire’s bathroom.  There is a lot of multicolored tile.  There is frosted glass.  There is track lighting.  At Yogurt Mountain there is no menu, no suggestions of yogurt and topping combination, no nothing.  In fact, there is no order or instructions:  you walk to the back of the store and select a paper cup (in 16 or 32 ounce varieties), walk over to a wall where eight-to-ten yogurt spigots are sticking out, choose your flavor and amount of yogurt, and flow (their word, not mine) over to the topping bar where you can douse your yogurt in as many toppings as you’d like, ranging from Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Gummi Bears to chunks of cheesecake and miniature cinnamon buns.  On the Yogurt Mountain website they proudly announce that “predetermined portions are a thing of the past!”, which, I mean, thank goodness.  I don’t know about you but I was tired of folks telling me how much yogurt I’m supposed to eat or how much crushed Butterfinger is too much.

As you’ve certainly ascertained by now, you pay for Yogurt Mountain by the ounce:  I dropped three dollars on a modest amount of strawberry and cheesecake yogurt with some graham cracker topping which is what I assumed to be par for the course, until, of course, I asked the teenage girl minding the scale what the average amount people pay for their own crazy creation, and she mentioned the seven to eight dollar range.  I asked if anyone has refused to pay for the monster that they themselves have created because it was too expensive, and she said it has happened on a number of occasions—usually when folks go crazy with the fruit or the denser items such as the cheesecake bites or the brownies.

But make no mistake:  people love it.  It is packed.  On Valentine’s Day this year, I walked past the “YoMo” (don’t call it that) and felt the sadness permeating through its glass windows:  sorority girls drowning themselves in the sweet sorrow of loneliness with no significant other and feeling their young lives spiraling out of control like the Cake Batter yogurt pooled up at the bottom of their cups.  The only thing they can control is the amount of fudge brownies they top their yogurt with, and dammit, they control it beautifully.

And this, friends, is where the war is waged.  The kind-hearted people of Tuscaloosa have rejected the predetermined approach to yogurt:  ordering from a TCBY menu and having someone else make their dessert for them, determining the proper amount of yogurt and candy and presenting it to the customer in one of three sizes.  It all seems so socialist and monotonous in comparison to Yogurt Mountain, where one is encouraged to create a masterpiece with zero limitations:  to be a dessert architect, to make our own Golden Opulence.  It’s scarily Randian—one cannot create a mountain of yogurt—or build a cyclotron—without knowledge of one’s aim and the means to achieve it, and Yogurt Mountain rewards this behavior.

This return to decadence in a frozen dessert that once seemed so pure might signal the on-going shift from social obligation and community to individualism and isolationism that has been interwoven in the backlash against our current state of affairs.  Despite my on-going irritating questions directed towards the girl manning the scale at Yogurt Mountain (Can I bring my own container?  What if I just filled the whole thing with crushed Kit-Kats?), she seemed pleased to have someone to talk to—the other customers that came in went during my time there said little to nothing to her:  they simply placed the container on the scale and paid.  One might think that the lords of Yogurt Mountain might get keen to this business model and have the entire thing self-serve with zero human interaction or stigma against yogurt and topping combinations (Root beer yogurt and Lucky Charms?  Are you CRAZY?) in order to promote further experimentation and to unlock true frozen yogurt potential.

The fear in all of this is simple:  will we admire our frozen yogurt creations to the extent where we will pay no attention to the company we keep?  Desserts are supposed to be social:  we ask the waitress for a few extra forks.  We go out for ice cream.  We make remarks at how delicious everything is—how sweet.  Tuscaloosa is referred to as the Druid City, yet in recent years the commerce board has pushed to give it a new moniker:  The City of Champions.  While Yogurt Mountain has unleashed these possibilities upon my fellow citizens and allowed us to create our own trophies, we must realize that these trophies will melt. An ivory tower made of Banana Pudding frozen yogurt topped with Cocoa Puffs will not stand.