Americans found plain yogurt too sour until fruit went on the bottom
In 1929 an Armenian couple in Massachusetts began delivering yogurt around New England by horse-drawn wagon, the cart first labelled madzoon. Plain yogurt stayed a hard sell to American tongues. Then in 1966 their Colombo company sweetened it and added fruit preserves underneath, and sales soon passed a million dollars a year.
Yogurt is milk soured by bacteria. Two species do most of the work, Lactobacillus delbrueckii bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, turning milk sugar into lactic acid, which firms the proteins and adds the tang. The culture sits at 30 to 45 degrees Celsius for 4 to 12 hours; hotter goes faster but risks lumps or separated whey. France only allows the name yaourt when those two species alone did the fermenting. Genome studies suggest both microbes started out living on plants, and fermenting strains have been cultured from Bulgarian plant samples.
Nobody knows who made the first batch. Neolithic herders in Central Asia and Mesopotamia probably stumbled on it around 5000 BC, soon after taming milk animals, and likely others found it independently elsewhere; early batches probably soured in goatskin bags. Greeks ate a version called oxygala, which the physician Galen said was taken with honey. Pliny the Elder noted that certain barbarous nations could thicken milk into something pleasantly acidic. The word itself is Turkic, tied to a verb meaning to knead or to curdle, and appears in 11th-century texts describing nomads.
Science caught up in 1905, when Stamen Grigorov, a Bulgarian medical student in Geneva, examined yogurt from his home village and described the rod-shaped microbe later named for Bulgaria. Ilya Mechnikov at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a Nobel laureate, then argued that yogurt explained the long lives of Bulgarian peasants and promoted it across Europe. Isaac Carasso industrialised it in Barcelona in 1919, naming his firm Danone, little Daniel, after his son; in America it became Dannon. A Prague dairy patented yogurt with fruit jam in 1933.
Mould on yogurt cannot simply be scraped away, because the soft texture lets it spread well beneath the surface. Colombo, the wagon brand, was sold to General Mills in 1993 and dropped in 2010.
Source: Yogurt
