Greek yogurt’s puzzling, meteoric rise in the U.S.

Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson has an interesting blog post on the puzzling spike in popularity of Greek yogurt in the U.S. In 2005, sales were a healthy-for-a-niche-product $60 million. In 2011, sales of the thicker, creamier product are projected to reach $1.5 billion, a staggering 2,400 per cent increase. Apparently it now makes up 19 per cent of the yogurt market. (In Canada, it’s yet to take off in the same way, although Loblaws is certainly betting that it will—according to Canadian Grocer, it’s “putting a huge sales push” on the stuff.) Thompson offers two somewhat unsatisfying explanations for the phenomenon: wealthy women in the workplace are lapping up the stuff as conspicuous consumption (“So foreign! So classy!” as Thompson, who doesn’t buy the reasoning, puts it); or, his preferred interpretation, “people are buying Greek yogurt, not despite the fact that it’s expensive compared to yogurts, but because it’s cheap compared to similarly filling foods.” In other words, it’s the yogurt that eats like a meal. Read the whole story [The Atlantic] »