LA Times confirms that Pinkberry’s product is yogurt

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The growing Pinkberry Inc. chain took a couple of body blows last month, when two consumer lawsuits were filed contending that the popular frozen dessert lacked the healthy bacteria cultures found in yogurt.

Making matters worse, Los Angeles-based Pinkberry can’t call its product frozen yogurt because it is mixed in the stores, not at a manufacturing plant as required by state regulations, authorities said. Pinkberry said its product contained yogurt, as well as a powder, but declined to say what else was in it.

Intrigued by the mystery of whether the product is actually yogurt, The Times sent samples of Pinkberry along with Golden Spoon and Baskin-Robbins frozen yogurt to a food lab for analysis.

The test results were clear: “Bottom line, they all had cultures,” said Brian Parmenter of Bodycote FPL, a food-testing lab in Portland, Ore. What’s more, they are all relatively low-calorie and fat-free. Of the three samples, Pinkberry logged the lowest calories per ounce with 26 and undetectable levels of fat.