The Biggest New Trend in Breakfast Is French-Inspired

For close to a decade now Greek yogurt has been king of the dairy aisle. In fact, the creamy, thick yogurt reportedly accounts for nearly 50 percent of yogurt sales in the United States. But the next time you head to the grocery store, you might want to try something new. There’s another type of yogurt that’s about to change the way you do breakfast.

First off, the previous uptick seen in the Greek yogurt industry is reaching its saturation point. Sales for yogurt fell last year, and Greek yogurt in particular fell by 4.6 percent, according to data from Nielsen.

“Old-fashioned Greek yogurt is definitely losing some steam,” Jared Koerten, a senior food analyst at Euromonitor, tells The Washington Post. “This is something we have been seeing for a couple years now.”

Companies are now experimenting outside the realm of Greek yogurt. Take Yoplait, which is releasing a line of “French-style yogurt” called Oui this summer starting in July. According to General Mills, the parent company of Yoplait that saw a 20 percent drop in U.S. yogurt sales last quarter, making this product entails using a “culturing process that is true to its Old World heritage but new to U.S. consumers.”

The yogurt is packaged in small glass pots and features fewer, non-GMO ingredients like whole milk, pure cane sugar, fruit, and yogurt cultures. And since they are cultured within the individual pots, there’s no need for ingredients like cornstarch or gelatin. The end result is thicker in texture and sweeter in taste than its Greek counterpart.

The more individualized production process means the going rate for the yogurt will be slightly more than Greek yogurt. Yoplait will retail it in various flavors: strawberry, blueberry, black cherry, vanilla, coconut, lemon, peach, and plain.

“It’s been 10 years really since a new segment has emerged in yogurt and we think this is what our business and the category needs to get back to growth,” David Clark, president of U.S. yogurt for ­General Mills, tells Star News Tribune.

But the jury is still out on whether French yogurt is even an authentic thing. A Nielsen spokesperson told Buzzfeed that “French is not a category.” Buzzfeed also reports that French yogurt is not an item listed or monitored by researcher Euromonitor. That said, General Mills makes the case that Oui is French because it’s how farmhouses in France made yogurt over a century ago.