Frozen Yogurt Becomes Booming Business

Frozen yogurt has spiralled into a cool $1.2 billion annual industry nationally, thanks in part to the search by consumers for healthier desserts.

Supermarket sales alone are estimated to be about $100 million a year, an increase from $25 million only four years ago.

It's a business bearing some resemblance to a roller coaster.

In the beginning, less than 15 years ago, frozen yogurt mostly was marketed in specialty shops. Many of these failed. But now the product is integrated into traditional ice-cream shops as well as being in the specialty shops and the supermarkets, both in self-service machines and in prepacked containers.

Stephen Beninati, president of Everything Yogurt, has kept a close watch on these changes. He heads the oldest and second-largest frozen-yogurt chain in the nation - 227 franchises, 44 under construction and 50 more planned for 1991. (TCBY Yogurt is the largest by far, with more than 1,700 branches in several countries and a deal recently signed for outlets in Japan.)

``The frozen-yogurt industry started out with a bang,'' Beninati recalls. ``But many business people didn't know what they were doing, seeing it as a get-rich kind of thing.''

Beninati, who helped start Everything Yogurt with headquarters on Staten Island, N.Y., in 1976, credits his success with approaching the product as a healthy food, not a dessert in competition with ice cream.

At his franchises (locally, in Westlake Center) this summer, a specialty is a 361-calorie meal - a fresh-fruit platter with four ounces of frozen yogurt, half a banana, strawberries, pineapple, blueberries, apple, watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, oranges and grapes.

Beninati says there are 80 calories in his four-ounce serving of nonfat frozen yogurt, but yogurt calories can skyrocket when customers add on candy toppings and syrups.

The mainstreaming of frozen yogurt, even at thousands of McDonald's restaurants, has the ice cream industry running scared, Beninati says, and that's why so many yogurt products are being integrated into the product lines of ice-cream manufacturers.

Darigold Inc., a local manufacturer of both products, views frozen yogurt as a rapidly growing segment of the market, but not something that is about to scoop away ice cream's solid lead.

Frozen yogurt accounts for about 2 percent of the entire frozen dessert market, says Jeff Princevalle, advertising manager for Darigold here. The growth is at a pace of about 100 percent a year, with projections continuing at that rate through the mid-1990s, he adds.

Since May of last year Darigold has been selling frozen yogurt in six flavors.