60 free Yogurt trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Yogurt is milk that a couple of bacteria have turned sour and thick, and humans have been eating it since Neolithic herders in Central Asia left milk in a goatskin bag. This quiz covers the science and the story: the two named cultures, the Bulgarian medical student who found one of them in 1905, the Nobel laureate who blamed yogurt for Bulgarian peasants living so long, and the Barcelona merchant who named a company after his son. From there it travels: labneh in the Levant, dahi and lassi in India, ayran in Turkey, skyr in Iceland, kefir in the Caucasus, matzoon in Armenia and viili in Finland, then back to America for Colombo's horse-drawn wagon, fruit-on-the-bottom, the TCBY name lawsuit, Pinkberry, Chobani's old Kraft plant and the Seinfeld episode that swung a mayoral election. There are questions on Greek yogurt labelling law, ant yogurt, and why an EU court says a plant-based pot cannot be called yogurt at all. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on yogurt, its regional varieties and the brands and people involved, so the dates, names and bacteria are reliable.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Yogurt gets its tart flavour and texture from bacteria converting milk sugars into which acid?
Lactic
The acid acts on milk protein to set the texture.
Q 02Which two bacteria are the standard cultures for making yogurt?
Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus
France only allows the label 'yaourt' if those two alone did the fermenting.
Q 03The word 'yogurt' comes from which language, from a verb meaning 'to knead' or 'to thicken'?
Turkish
The form yuġrut appears in Uyghur texts from before the year 1000.
Q 04Which country has its own distinctive spelling, 'yogourt', alongside yogurt and yoghurt?
Canada
It is a minority variant of the French yaourt.
Q 05Yogurt was probably first discovered by Neolithic people in Central Asia and Mesopotamia around when?
5000 BC
That is when the first milk-producing animals were domesticated; the earliest yogurts likely fermented by chance in goatskin bags.
Q 06The oldest writings mentioning yogurt, on 'barbarous nations' thickening milk to 'an agreeable acidity', are attributed to which Roman author?
Pliny the Elder
The ancient Greeks had oxygala, which Galen said was eaten with honey.
Q 07Which Bulgarian medical student first identified the rod-shaped bacterium in Bulgarian yogurt in 1905?
Stamen Grigorov
In 1907 it was named Bacillus bulgaricus in his country's honour.
Q 08Which Nobel laureate argued yogurt explained Bulgarian peasants' long lives, popularising it across Europe?
Ilya Mechnikov
He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize for discovering phagocytosis and coined the word gerontology.
Q 09Isaac Carasso founded Danone in 1919 in which city, naming it after his son?
Barcelona
'Danon' was little Daniel's Catalan nickname; the US arm became Dannon.
Q 10Yogurt with added fruit jam was patented in 1933 by a dairy in which city?
Prague
The Radlická Mlékárna dairy held the patent.
Q 11Which American health reformer popularised yogurt at his Battle Creek Sanitarium?
John Harvey Kellogg
Yogurt reached the US in the 1900s in tablet form for those with digestive intolerance.
Q 12Colombo yogurt was first delivered by horse-drawn wagon bearing which word from the founders' homeland?
Madzoon
The Colombosians switched to 'yogurt' because customers from the eastern Mediterranean knew that word better.
Q 13In 1966 Colombo Yogurt tackled American distaste for sourness by inventing which format?
Fruit on the bottom
Sales soon passed $1 million a year; General Mills bought the brand in 1993 and dropped it in 2010.
Q 21Which yogurt brand's flower logo has six petals for its six founding French dairy cooperatives?
Yoplait
The 1965 name is a portmanteau of the member brands Yola and Coplait.
Q 22The name Yakult was coined from 'jahurto', the word for yogurt in which language?
Esperanto
Minoru Shirota invented it in 1935; 'Yakult ladies' have delivered it door to door since 1963.
Q 23Danone's Activia was launched in France in which year, under the 'Bio' brand name?
1987
Its health claims later drew lawsuits in the EU, Canada and the US; Jamie Lee Curtis fronted US adverts from 2010.
Which country's law requires yogurt to contain at least 1 million lactobacillus CFU per millilitre?
Q 14Yogurt is fermented at a warm temperature of roughly 30-45°C for how long?
4 to 12 hours
Higher temperatures work faster but risk a lumpy texture or whey separating.
Q 15What defines 'set-style' yogurt, as opposed to stirred yogurt?
It sets in the pot it is sold in
Commercial 'Swiss-style' pots are often thickened with starch, pectin or gelatin and have nothing to do with Switzerland.
Q 16Straining yogurt through cloth removes what to make it thicker?
Whey
In the Middle East the result is labneh, which can be rolled into balls and kept in olive oil.
Q 17In Britain and the EU, what does the label 'Greek' (rather than 'Greek-style') guarantee about a yogurt?
It was made in Greece
In North America 'Greek yogurt' simply means strained, with no legal definition at all.
Q 18Under which brand name did Greek company Fage import strained yogurt to Britain in the 1980s?
Total
Fage's name is both Greek for 'eat!' and the initials of Filippou Brothers Dairy Company.
Q 19Chobani launched in 2007 from a New York plant that had been closed by which company?
Kraft Foods
He bought it with a Small Business Administration loan and rehired former Kraft staff.
Q 20In April 2016 Hamdi Ulukaya announced he was giving Chobani employees what?
10% of the company's shares
Chobani grew from under 1% of the US yogurt market in 2007 to over 20% by 2021.
China
The Codex Alimentarius sets the international definition of yogurt.
Q 25Why can plant-based alternatives not be sold as 'yogurt' in the European Union?
The word is reserved for animal-origin foods
A 2017 Court of Justice ruling confirmed it; the US FDA likewise reserves the word for milk-derived products.
Q 26In parts of the Balkans and Anatolia, yogurt has traditionally been made by adding what to warm milk?
Red wood ants
The ants' formic acid acidifies the milk and microbes from their bodies do the fermenting.
Q 27Which yogurt, one of Hindu ritual's five panchamrita elixirs, is named from the Sanskrit for 'sour milk'?
Dahi
In India a starter is sometimes made with dried red chillies, which carry lactobacilli.
Q 28Lassi originated in Punjab, where it is traditionally made from the milk of which animal?
Water buffalo
Bhang lassi, infused with cannabis, is sold legally in parts of India at Holi.
Q 29Shrikhand, the western Indian dessert of strained yogurt, is flavoured with sugar and which spices?
Saffron, cardamom and nutmeg
Mango or pineapple is sometimes added.
Q 30Ayran, the salty yogurt drink, is a national drink of which country?
Turkey
It is yogurt, water and salt, and is also hugely popular in Bulgaria.