![]() Sales of runny, sugary Yoplait were oozing off a cliff. So Yoplait executives ran to their test kitchens and developed a Greek yogurt of their own. All they needed was the perfect, authentic-sounding name. One group argued for the Greek word for health and some oddly ecstatic punctuation: Ygeía! Another camp said that sounded like someone vomiting, and pushed instead for made-up names that combined Yoplait with Hellenic suffixes, such as Yoganos.įor months, several current and former employees told me, executives debated the options. One manager began ostentatiously leafing through a Greek dictionary during meetings a rival, not to be outdone, started auditing Greek language classes.Įventually a choice was needed. Yoplait, based in Minneapolis, is part of General Mills, the huge international food conglomerate, which prides itself on cleareyed, data-driven decision-making. Cold, hard numbers - not passion - have made Cheerios, Green Giant and Betty Crocker into colossal brands. “We’re disciplined,” David Clark, a 26-year company veteran, told me. So in the end, executives turned to their spreadsheets. They discovered that neither Ygeía! nor Yoganos - nor any of the other ersatz names - tested well. The data pointed in a more traditional direction. So to great fanfare, in 2010, they released their finely tuned attempt to reclaim the yogurt crown. ![]() And so has almost every other Greek yogurt product that Yoplait has put on shelves. The company’s overall yogurt sales have declined by over $100 million since 2010. ![]() ![]() As Chobani and others have earned billions, General Mills’s share of the yogurt market has shrunk by a third. So now, Yoplait is opening a new front in the cultured-milk battles. Next month, when you walk down the dairy aisle of your grocery store, you’ll see the company’s latest salvo, a new formula that executives say is innovative, exciting and - c’est possible? - passionate. They’re calling it Oui by Yoplait, in homage to the company’s French roots. Whether it will succeed remains to be seen. But if, as you are shopping, you happen to pick up a small glass pot of Oui and are momentarily transported to the French countryside, you’ll know that the company has finally figured out how to look beyond the data and embrace the narrative. Yoplait may have figured out how to fake authenticity as craftily as everyone else. ![]()
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