It feels a bit weird to post any non-election news this week. But our Buying Guides — which give you simple answers to absurdly complicated food decisions — are this newsletter’s bread and butter. We’ll be back next week with political analysis about what a second Trump presidency means for your food.
I eat yogurt every day and, much to my meat-loving husband’s dismay, have named a Greek yogurt parfait (with a view of the Aegean, please!) as my perfect last meal. So I naively assumed I was a bit of an expert on buying yogurt.
Not so! Today’s grocery store has so, so many options that I bet, like me, you long ago picked a brand and stuck with it – just to preserve your sanity.
Smart move. We almost lost it trawling through dozens (and dozens) of brands and flavors, from vanilla to key lime pie. Our conclusion: plain, unsweetened yogurt with add-ins of your choice, is the way to go. Here are our top picks.
BEST GREEKS: Fage Total 5% Greek and Wallaby Organic Greek Yogurt
Price: $7.29/32 oz and $7.99/32 oz
Why we like it: Fage, the original Greek yogurt, won our taste test with its rich, creamy and not-too-tangy flavor; it’s also available everywhere – supermarkets, convenience stores, airports, you name it – and uses non-GMO Project Verified milk. Wallaby was our taste-test runner-up with a slightly more tangy flavor, and our top organic pick. We always encourage buying certified organic for its broad environmental benefits.
BEST TRADITIONAL: Maple Hill Organic 100% Grass-Fed Cream on Top Yogurt
Price: 7$.49/32 oz
Why we like it: Raising dairy cows exclusively on grass is pretty unusual today, but it not only produces healthier and tastier milk, it’s better for the environment, too. We love this yogurt’s silky texture and balanced, creamy flavor. Like Maple Hill’s milk, it has fresh, subtle floral notes.
UPGRADE PICK: Painterland Sisters Organic Skyr Yogurt
Price: $10.99/24 oz
Why we like it: This new brand ticks all the boxes: organic, pasture-raised, lactose-free milk from family farms using regenerative farming practices. Plus a round, creamy flavor with none of the chalky aftertaste found in many plain yogurts. This would have been our best all-around pick. But while it is available in all 50 states, it is not ubiquitous like our other picks. And it is significantly more expensive than more mainstream brands.
BEST ON-THE-GO OPTION: Fage Total 2% Splits
Price: $1.79/5.3 oz cup
Why we like it: We’re pragmatists. So we don’t expect you to mix your own yogurt and carry around containers that need to be washed out. Which is why we also recommend Fage Total Split Cups – one side fruit or honey; one side 2% Greek yogurt (it doesn’t come in whole milk). Every fruit flavor has 11 grams of sugar – in line with low-sugar options we thought tasted far worse. Be warned, though: The honey version has 29 grams of sugar, nearly three times more than the fruit flavors!
The Hunt
Most people think of yogurt as health food. And in its purest form, it is: full of protein, calcium, and lots of good bacteria for your gut.
Sadly, many of the yogurts in American grocery stores are more dessert than health food, and many mainstream brands are what nutritionists would describe as “ultra-processed,” thanks to artificial sweeteners, emulsifiers, and stabilizers.
Case(s) in point:
Noosa’s Lemon Yogurt, which comes in an 8-ounce tub and is TRULY delicious, has 37 grams of sugar (25 are added sugars). That’s more than 9 teaspoons of sugar; nearly as much as a can of Coke. True, 8 ounces is bigger than most individual serving sizes, which range between 5.3 ounces and 6 ounces, but it’s really, really hard not to finish this yogurt once you start.
Danone Low-fat Vanilla Yogurt sounds good for you but just 5.3 ounces has 22 grams of sugar (17 added). Do the math and per-ounce it’s got more sugar than electric-colored Go-Gurt (!!) and only slightly less than the (delicious but over the top) Lemon Noosa.
I could go on, outlining all the ways that yogurt is annoyingly complex. (I’m particularly irritated by the way sugar content varies among flavors within brands: Chobani’s honey vanilla has 20 grams of sugar per serving, 30 percent more than its pineapple flavor; while Noosa’s honey yogurt has 25 percent less sugar than its lemon. Huh?)
The bottom line is that unless you want to spend hours reading labels and comparing serving sizes, the smartest thing to do is to choose plain yogurt and add your own sweeteners.
For this buying guide, we looked at 14 plain yogurts. We considered only nationally available brands and eliminated any that had ingredients beyond milk and cultures: in this case, only one – a premium (and often more expensive) brand, Brown Cow, which adds pectin for texture. (See more in our “fine print” section below.)
The basics
In the beginning, there was yogurt: milk that is cultured to transform lactose (milk sugars) into lactic acid, preserving it and giving it a tangy flavor. Thanks to the hippies, and then yuppies, yogurt went mainstream in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Soon there was low-fat, non-fat, flavored, and no-sugar flavored yogurt.
Greek yogurt arrived in the late 1990s with the Fage (pronounced Fa-Ye) Total brand. But it really took off in the mid-aughts when Chobani burst on to the scene. In Greece, yogurt is often made with sheep or goat’s milk; here it’s your regular cow’s milk but strained, as it is in Greece, to make it thicker, creamier, and more tangy. It also means it has far less sugar and carbs and more protein than traditional, looser yogurts, which still contain whey. In our analysis of Greek yogurts, they had about three times as much protein as the traditional yogurts and as much as 40% less sugar. You can understand why Greek yogurt was a hit.
Next came skyr, hitting shelves around 2010. Skyr is a lot like Greek yogurt. But the cultures, which hail from Iceland, make for a creamier, less tangy product. Skyr also generally has little or no lactose, so it’s a good choice for the lactose-intolerant.
The smart choice(s)
If nutrition is your thing, there’s really no reason not to choose Greek or skyr. But if, like Liz, you prefer the looser texture of yogurt, we recommend Maple Hill Cream on Top for its glossy mouthfeel and creamy flavor.
In many of our buying guides, there’s a clear winner based on nutrition, environmental, or taste concerns. With Greek or Skyr, they are all pretty similar. The variations between the levels of protein, sugar, fat don’t justify steering clear of any one brand. For protein, most are in the 2 to 3 gram per ounce range; fat runs from 1 to 1.5 grams per ounce. We made our choices based on the quality of the milk – giving preference to organic and non-GMO – and taste.
This resulted in two of our winners: the OG, Fage Total, a creamy, round 5% milk fat Greek, and Wallaby Aussie Greek, which is made with organic milk and has a tangy, but not-too sharp, flavor like some of the others. (Nancy’s, we’re talking to you!) Chobani, the 800-pound gorilla of Greek yogurts, was our least favorite with a chalky and bitter aftertaste.
There was one outlier on fat, and that was Painterland Sisters Skyr, an up-and-coming brand run by two Pennsylvania sisters. It is a revelation. With 6% milk fat, it is lusciously creamy and much more balanced in flavor than the Greeks. It costs more and does have more fat – 3.4 g of fat per ounce. We think it’s worth it, which is why we made this our upgrade pick.
Put jam on it – but not too much!
OK, let’s get real. Unless you are doing a taste test, no one eats plain yogurt plain. Our rationale for recommending plain yogurt is that you can add what you like and control how much you add so you don’t inadvertently end up with dessert for breakfast.
But we were surprised to learn how quickly you can end up with a high-sugar breakfast, even if you add your own.
1 tablespoon of Bon Maman jam (a stand-in for good jam) has 12 grams of sugar.
1 tablespoon of honey has 17 grams of sugar.
In other words: If you add a tablespoon of jam or honey to the standard 5.3 ounce serving of plain yogurt, you now have total sugars of 17 to 22 grams of sugar. That’s four to five teaspoons! Which is more or less what you find in most flavored yogurts.
So why don’t we recommend flavored yogurts, especially low-sugar varieties?
Here’s why:
Every flavored yogurt we have found includes some kind of stabilizer or emulsifier (It won’t kill you but it’s always good to avoid ultra-processed ingredients if you can!)
Many low-sugar yogurts, like Siggi’s, use artificial or alternative sweeteners such as Stevia or monkfruit, which can have off-flavors.
The remaining low-sugar options like Chobani…just don’t taste that good.
For the healthiest yogurt, mix in your own sweetener, but be conscious of what you add. Sticking to 2 teaspoons of sweetener per standard serving allows you to (hopefully) stay within a healthy range. The American Heart Association recommends adult men consume just 36 grams of sugar per day; women only 25.
Our on-the-go pick, the Fage Splits with fruit keep you in this range. But remember, the honey flavor has nearly three times as much sugar as any of the fruit options. (29 grams vs 11 grams.)
The Fine Print
Our buying guides are much more than taste tests. We try to balance nutrition, environmental pros and cons, price, and taste. Click here to learn more about our philosophy and selection process.
What we included in this buying guide:
14 whole milk plain yogurts with national distribution including:
Traditional yogurts: Alexandre Family Farm Full Fat, Maple Hill Cream on Top, Stonyfield Organic Probiotic
Greek: Chobani, Fage Total, Maple Hill Greek, Nancy’s Probiotic, Nounos, Stonyfield Plain Greek, Wallaby Organic Aussie Style Yogurt
Skyr: Icelandic Provisions, Norr Organic, Painterland Sisters, Siggi’s
Flavored yogurts were evaluated but eliminated before taste testing due to high-sugar content and additives
Plain yogurts that used pectins and other emulsifiers were also eliminated from the taste test. (Only one included them, Brown Cow, Stonyfield’s non-organic brand.)
What we didn’t include:
Regional brands: Many regional brands like Strauss Family Creamery (California) and Seven Stars (Pennsylvania) produce wonderful products. But we limited ourselves to national brands.
Store (a.k.a. private label)brands: There’s little transparency in the private label world, so it’s hard to say who’s supplying the yogurt or if/when that changes.
What we prioritized:
Organic or non-GMO milk: Organic yogurts are better for the environment; if you can afford it, it’s a good choice.
Low sugar: Plain yogurts do not have added sugar. But there was still some variation in grams of sugar per serving. Skyr tends to have less lactose (milk sugar) so it’s also usually a bit lower in total sugar. Greek, which is strained, on the whole has less too.
High protein: If you’re eating yogurt for breakfast or lunch, protein will help fill you up. Greek yogurt and skyr has about three times more protein than traditional, unstrained yogurt.
Prices:
Comparing prices is surprisingly difficult. We reached out to companies to find out each yogurt’s MSRP (Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price), but were told that retailers set their own prices, which can vary widely. We checked prices at a Washington, D.C. Whole Foods Market, where most of the yogurts were within 50 cents or $1 of one another when sold at full price. But due to retail promotions at the time of our research, Wallaby Organic was on sale with a Prime Discount for $1.50 less than regular price; Siggi’s was $1 cheaper and Stonyfield Organic was cheapest of all.