The feverish yogurt boom is over. Or, then again, maybe yogurt makers are just getting started. Data on the yogurt market show that U.S. yogurt sales are declining after years of explosive growth that begat a veritable smorgasbord of interpretations of the creamy, fermented goo (See: Greek! Icelandic! French! Probiotic!) on grocery store shelves. Has America reached peak yogurt or is the industry on the cusp of convincing consumers to eat skyr at every meal?
Dueling prognosticators seem to illustrate two different views on the yogurt trend — one optimistic and one more convincingly pessimistic. A market research firm called Packaged Facts released a report forecasting that U.S. yogurt sales would reached roughly $9.8 billion by 2022, according to USA Today. That report runs counter to projections from a firm called Mintel, which predicts only $8.2 billion in sales by 2022 — a decline of 3.5 percent from the present. Mintel also observed that consumers were eating slightly less yogurt on average in 2018 than they were in 2017. Nielsen and Euromonitor data compiled by the Wall Street Journal also backs up Mintel’s analysis that yogurt sales are beginning to level out and fall — that is with the exception or Icelandic skyr yogurt, non-dairy options, and yogurt smoothies.
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