Cold Stone Creamery announced that it is rolling out its new frozen yogurt offering to all locations nationwide.
The frozen yogurt, which launched in select locations in January, will be available alongside the chain’s signature ice cream for customers to choose when customizing their Cold Stone Creations.
Ray Karam, senior tastemaster for Cold Stone, says the concept took its time before jumping on board the latest fro-yo bandwagon because it wanted to ensure the trend was here to stay.
“Yogurt has come and gone a few times over the last 30 years, and we’ve had yogurt in our history before, but discontinued it after it lost favor in the public,” Karam says.
“This time it came around it was a very different animal, so we wanted to make sure that the trend was going to be around, and that if we were going to get into it, we wanted to make sure that what we debuted in our stores was competitive.”
The frozen yogurt will be available in many of Cold Stone’s signature flavors, such as Cake Batter, French Vanilla, and Cheesecake, and there will also be unique frozen yogurt flavors, like Pink CountryTime Lemonade and Blueberry Pomegranate.
Most of Cold Stone’s available ice cream mix-ins work well for frozen yogurt, Karam says, though he says fruit is best for yogurt and that chocolate is not always best with something as acidic as yogurt.
He says translating Cold Stone ice cream flavors to frozen yogurt is not difficult, but that the characteristics of each require different levels of flavoring.
“One is very creamy and there’s a lot of butter fat and milk solids and sugars in there to make great ice cream, and the other, you have something that is nonfat, very low sugar, so you have adjust the amount of flavoring to just the right amount to match the dairy,” he says.
Karam says that not only did the latest frozen yogurt craze encourage Cold Stone to relaunch the product, but that the healthy-eating trend did, as well.
“We wanted to play in that arena, so if there’s a family or group of people who want to come to Cold Stone but they don’t want to load up on the calories, they have something to choose from,” he says.
“And knowing that Cold Stone has quality products, they know we’re going to give them a really good frozen yogurt as well.”
By Sam Oches
