Behind every great discovery is a healthy dose of curiosity.
When professor Lynn Ogden of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, put a block of dried ice in yogurt to see what would happen, the result was somewhat surprising — a light-textured yogurt with a pleasant tingling taste.
After further development in Ogden’s laboratory at Brigham Young University’s Nutrition, Dietetics and Food Sciences Department, “Sparkling Yogurt” was patented in 1997.
Ogden’s discovery simply gives yogurt and other spoonable desserts like custard, pudding, and soft ice cream a more interesting taste sensation.
These foods are carbonated using the standard process of bubbling compressed CO2 through the products, and then packaging to retain the carbonation. The “sparkling yogurt” was sold on the Brigham Young University campus from 1995-1996.
It was more popular than traditional yogurt and outperformed other yogurts in taste tests. Encouraged by these results, in 2006 the university granted exclusive rights to General Mills for selling the product as Fizzix™ in the United States. To date “sparkling yogurt” has been patented in 29 countries. General Mills and other distributors are hoping more children eight to 12 years old will improve their diets by eating more yogurt and fewer sugary snacks.
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