Yoplait

Hi there,

After my 1 millionth Yoplait yogurt this morning, and after my 1 millionth time pledging to write a strongly worded letter to you people, I am finally doing it today. I love yogurt for breakfast, but every morning I have to pry the tinfoil top off, get yogurt splattered on me and the counter, lick off the yogurt adhered to the tinfoil, throw that away, and then begin the arduous task of trying to move the rest of the contents from the ridiculous container into my mouth.

As you begin your yogurt journey, you notice that the container has a false-bottom that gives the illusion that you are getting much more yogurt than you really are.

In addition, the bottom is raised in the middle and then tapered down towards the edges, making it impossible by conventional methods to extract all of the product.

Next you notice that the container is small at the top and larger at the bottom, making it inherently difficult from the get-go. It is like poking your head into a small opening of a cave before it widens out into a much larger cavern.

Then there is the insipid, odious, infuriating lip on the top rim of the container, further rendering it impossible for the average consumer to remove all of the yogurt...more like 70% would be a reasonable estimate. (This percentage goes down to 50% if you are under the age of 18.) If you try licking it out from under the lip, you cut your tongue and you look like a fat guy trying to get more food into his stomach by sucking on a container...it's embarrassing when my kids or wife are watching.

Fortunately I am not your average consumer and I have a special yogurt spoon that is long, skinny, and has a pointy spoon-end which boosts my product-extraction amount up to about 80-85%. But still, that's a good 15-20% of waste.

If I spend $1 apiece on these things, I am throwing away 15 to 20 cents every damn morning which I will not stand for!

So...when no-one is looking, I take my hopefully clean index finger, and using it like a squeegee I scrape as much yogurt as I can from the sides and bottom of the container (my finger is just long enough to reach the bottom). I lick my finger clean and then go back in, using just the tip to carefully slide around under the upper ridge and get as much of that stuff as I can. I have thought about using a Q-Tip for the ridge, but that seems weird and just more added daily expense.

With my advanced methods and perseverance I have managed to boost my product-extraction ratio on a typical Yoplait yogurt up to about 90-95%. Not bad, but I am still annoyed about it on a daily basis.

I do not need that kind of hassle...life is hard enough. I have tried other yogurts (Greek) just because of the far superior container design, but they are thick and gross so I invariably go back to the daily Yoplait grind.

Please forward this letter to your advanced team of engineers who design product containers and see if they can come up with a solution to this problem. It's not rocket science, it's yogurt science and I think you can do better.

Figure it out...if not for me, then for your own peace of mind...karma is real. Do the right thing.

Thank you,

Peter Glover