Food 2000s heyday 2006–c. 2010

Yogos

Kellogg's Yogos Commercial (2007)

▶ The original commercial — press play

Kellogg's yogurt-coated fruit bits that came in a box, lived in lunchboxes, and vanished after about five years. Yogos reached shelves in 2006, spun off Bits and Sour Bits, and disappeared around 2010 as the sugar in a "yogurt" snack got a hard look; the company has said since that it has no plans to bring them back.

Kellogg's filed for the Yogos trademark in July 2005 and had them in stores by 2006, when a newspaper taste panel found "a new addition in the fruit snack aisle" at $2.99 for a 4.8-ounce box. They were bite-size chewy fruit-flavored centers in a creamy yogurt shell, sold by the box like fruit snacks rather than chilled like yogurt, and they rode the mid-2000s idea that anything with yogurt in the name was the healthier choice. Spin-offs followed: Yogos Bits and Yogos Sour Bits.

The problem was the ingredient list. The first ingredients were sugar and corn syrup. When Kellogg's nutrition claims came under federal scrutiny during the obesity debate, a 2010 New York Times report singled out Yogos' sugar content; Celeste A. Clark, the company's senior vice president for global nutrition, answered that "with balance and moderation all foods can have a place in the diet." Kellogg's never announced a discontinuation or gave a reason, and accounts differ on whether the snack was gone in 2010 or 2011, but it was gone.

The mourning has outlasted the product by more than a decade. Fans have petitioned for a revival (one White House "We the People" petition from December 2015 collected a single signature), and in 2018 Kellogg's answered a request on social media by saying it had no plans to make Yogos again. Welch's Fruit 'n Yogurt Snacks are the closest thing on the shelf today, and by most accounts a tamer one.

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