Smooooth! Mr. Tidbit is ever in awe of the endless variety of yogurt and yogurt products from the Yoplait engine at General Mills.
The website lists 24 flavors of original Yoplait, 21 flavors of Yoplait Light, seven Thick & Creamy, nine Whips, seven Yo-Plus "for digestive health" (and trendiness -- flavors include blackberry pomegranate and blueberry acai), three Yo-Plus Light, eight flavor combinations of Go-Gurt, five flavor combinations of Yoplait Trix, seven varieties of Yoplait Kids (for toddlers), four flavors of Yoplait Fiber One and four flavors of the recently mentioned pudding-like Yoplait Delights.
That's a stunning 99 ways to get your Yoplait.
And now, to put the number solidly over 100, there are three flavors of Yoplait Smoothies -- find them in the freezer case. As the bag describes the product, it is "frozen fruit and frozen yogurt pieces." You put them into a blender, add a cup of skim milk and whomp it for a minute or so, and -- wait for it -- it's two 8-ounce smoothies! Amazing!
Mr. Tidbit bought the strawberry banana flavor. His sensation that the 7.6-ounce bag didn't feel like a lot of fruit and yogurt pieces for $3.29 was intensified when he opened it. He counted 27 pieces of strawberry (which he replicated as four large berries), seven banana slices (totaling probably about half a banana) and 10 little chunks of nonfat yogurt, each about the size of a thick slice of banana.
If you bought a banana, it'd cost you about 20 cents, tops; half is a dime. A pint of strawberries (the king-size double-wides) is maybe $5 in an off-season like this; the cost of the berries in the Smoothie bag would be about 75 cents. The yogurt -- about a third of a 6-ounce cup -- would be 25 cents or less. Total $1.10.
To fully duplicate the miracle of Yoplait Smoothies, you would have to cut these items up and freeze them, so you are paying General Mills $2.19 to do that for you.
AL SICHERMAN
