Fro-Down

NEW YORK — My summer postcard begins last fall.

One September afternoon, I followed a group of friends down Arrow Street on a whim. Little did I know how familiar that walk would become.

It was then I first experienced the now-ubiquitous, tart-tasting frozen yogurt. The flavors. The toppings. Yes, it was that day I had my first Berryline.

I've been a regular ever since, but for months I spooned down my order unaware of the myriad other "berry" stores. Slowly, the truth began to dawn on me.

On an intersession trip to New York, I discovered Pinkberry. On a trip to Miami, I ran across Blissberry. And a few weeks ago, I gave Red Mango a try and watched as a fellow intern innocuously asked an employee about the Pinkberry across the street.

The response was severe.

"We're the original," she tersely informed our group of interns lined up at the register, before implying Pinkberry's product wasn't even real yogurt.

Suddenly I was curious. Who kicked off this "berry" craze? And who perfected it?

The first question appears to have an easy answer. Most reports credit South Korean chain Red Mango with starting the trend when it began selling tart frozen yogurt in 2002, years before Pinkberry opened the first similar store in the U.S. Soon there were dozens of shops offering the treat, and as the market grew crowded, the competition grew fierce, with law suits and allegations of peddling unnatural "yogurt" flying between store owners.

But all that got me no closer to answering the second question: who has the best fro-yo?

So last Saturday, I set out to answer it with only a notepad, a pen, and an intrepid photographer, who "[did]n't even like fro-yo that much."

Take a look at what we encountered in the slideshow below, and then let us know your favorite fro-yo spot in the comments, especially if you don't see it here.

—Clifford M. Marks '10, a Crimson news editor, is an economics concentrator in Eliot House. Samantha P. Krug '10 contributed to the fro-yo sampling for this article.