TCBY

Frank D. Hickingbotham opened the first store in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1981 and named it after his own reaction to tasting frozen yogurt: "This Can't Be Yogurt." Franchising began in 1982 with twenty franchises by the end of the year, and in 1984 a lawsuit from a Texas competitor forced a new reading of the initials, "The Country's Best Yogurt." The company went public in May 1984, a year in which the count went from 41 stores to 102; it had 242 by the end of 1985, 500 shops in nearly every state by 1987 and 1,582 by 1989, with the stock at $28 a share.

The pitch was health. The advertising ran on "All of the pleasure, none of the guilt," and on the arithmetic that frozen yogurt was about four percent fat against ice cream's ten or more. The 1990s were harder than the numbers suggest: no new franchises opened in 1990, the start of a consolidation that lasted two more years as the field crowded and the economy slumped, though TCBY still held about 45 percent of the frozen-yogurt segment in 1992. It began co-branding with Taco Bell, McDonald's, Subway and Burger King in 1995 and with A&W restaurants and CITGO convenience stores in 1996, and by 1997 it counted 2,782 stores in 65 nations, with more than 3,000 franchises and 1999 sales of $109 million by the time it was sold.

Capricorn, the owner of Mrs. Fields, bought TCBY in 2000 for about $140 million, moved the headquarters to Salt Lake City and became Mrs. Fields Famous Brands. There were still 1,777 American locations in 2001, but the self-serve frozen-yogurt wave that followed, Pinkberry in 2005, Red Mango in 2006, Menchie's in 2007, belonged to other chains: the count fell to roughly 900 by 2008 and 405 by 2011, the combined company moved to Broomfield, Colorado in 2012, and a few hundred TCBYs remain.