Yogurt Trivia
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58 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 58 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
Lactic acid, produced as the cultures ferment the lactose in milk, lowers the pH and curdles the casein proteins, giving yogurt its tang and its set texture.
Q 02Which two bacteria are the standard cultures for making yogurt?
Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus
Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus are the two cultures the Codex Alimentarius yogurt standard requires; France reserves the label 'yaourt' for milk fermented by those two alone.
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
Canada uses 'yogourt' on packaging because the spelling reads in both official languages; in French it is a minority variant of the usual yaourt.
Q 05Yogurt was probably first made in Central Asia and Mesopotamia around when?
5000 BC
Around 5000 BC, when herders in Central Asia and Mesopotamia were milking domesticated animals, milk carried in goatskin bags likely soured into yogurt by chance.
Q 06The oldest writings mentioning yogurt, on 'barbarous nations' thickening milk to 'an agreeable acidity', are attributed to which Roman author?
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder, in his first-century Natural History, noted that certain 'barbarous nations' knew how to thicken milk into a substance with an agreeable acidity.
Q 07Which Bulgarian medical student first identified the rod-shaped bacterium in Bulgarian yogurt in 1905?
Stamen Grigorov
Stamen Grigorov, a Bulgarian medical student working in Geneva, isolated the rod-shaped bacillus in 1905; two years later it was named in honour of Bulgaria.
Q 08Which Nobel laureate argued yogurt explained Bulgarian peasants' long lives, popularising it across Europe?
Ilya Mechnikov
Ilya Mechnikov, who shared the 1908 Nobel Prize for discovering phagocytosis, credited the long lives of Bulgarian peasants to the bacteria in their soured milk.
Q 09Isaac Carasso founded Danone in 1919 in which city, naming it after his son?
Barcelona
Barcelona was where Isaac Carasso began selling yogurt through pharmacies in 1919; Danone comes from 'Danon', the Catalan pet name of his son Daniel.
Q 10Yogurt with added fruit jam was patented in 1933 by a dairy in which city?
Prague
Prague was home to the Radlická Mlékárna dairy, which patented yogurt with added fruit jam in 1933.
Q 11Which American health reformer popularised yogurt at his Battle Creek Sanitarium?
John Harvey Kellogg
John Harvey Kellogg served yogurt to patients at his Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, promoting it as a remedy for digestive ailments.
Q 12Colombo yogurt was first delivered by horse-drawn wagon bearing which word from the founders' homeland?
Madzoon
Madzoon, the Armenian word for yogurt, was painted on the Colombosian family's delivery wagon in 1929; they later switched to 'yogurt', the word their eastern Mediterranean customers knew.
Q 13In 1966 Colombo Yogurt tackled American distaste for sourness by inventing which format?
Fruit on the bottom
Q 21Which yogurt brand's flower logo has six petals for its six founding French dairy cooperatives?
Yoplait
Yoplait was formed in 1965 by merging the cooperative brands Yola and Coplait; its six-petal flower logo stands for the six founding dairy cooperatives.
Q 22The name Yakult was coined from 'jahurto', the word for yogurt in which language?
Esperanto
Esperanto supplied the name: Yakult is adapted from jahurto, the constructed language's word for yogurt, which Minoru Shirota chose when he launched the drink in 1935.
Q 23Danone's Activia was launched in France in which year, under the 'Bio' brand name?
1987
1987 was the French launch year: Danone sold the yogurt, cultured with its own Bifidobacterium strain, as 'Bio' before rebranding it Activia for markets where 'bio' means organic.
Fruit on the bottom put a layer of sweetened fruit preserves under plain yogurt, letting customers stir in as much sweetness as they liked and turning a sour product into a mainstream American snack.
Q 14Yogurt is fermented at a warm temperature of roughly 30-45°C for how long?
4 to 12 hours
Between 4 to 12 hours at 30–45 °C is the usual window; a hotter, faster fermentation risks a lumpy curd, while a cooler one simply takes longer to set.
Q 15What defines 'set-style' yogurt, as opposed to stirred yogurt?
It sets in the pot it is sold in
It sets in the pot it is sold in: set-style yogurt is incubated in its retail container, whereas stirred or 'Swiss-style' yogurt ferments in a vat and is stirred before filling.
Q 16Straining yogurt through cloth removes what to make it thicker?
Whey
Whey, the watery liquid left after the milk proteins curdle, drains through the cloth, leaving the thicker strained yogurt sold as Greek yogurt or labneh.
Q 17In Britain, what does the label 'Greek' rather than 'Greek-style' guarantee about a yogurt?
It was made in Greece
It was made in Greece: the 2014 Fage v Chobani ruling held that British shoppers understand 'Greek yoghurt' to mean thick strained yogurt made in Greece, so other producers must say 'Greek-style'.
Q 18Under which brand name did Greek company Fage import strained yogurt to Britain in the 1980s?
Total
Total was the Fage brand that reached British shelves in 1983, when the company began exporting its strained yogurt; Fage itself is Greek for 'eat!'.
Q 19Chobani launched in 2007 from a New York plant that had been closed by which company?
Kraft Foods
Kraft Foods had shut the South Edmeston, New York plant in 2005; Hamdi Ulukaya bought it with a Small Business Administration loan and rehired several former Kraft workers.
Q 20In April 2016 Hamdi Ulukaya announced he was giving Chobani employees what?
10% of the company's shares
10% of the company's shares were handed to about 2,000 full-time Chobani employees in April 2016, with the largest grants going to the longest-serving staff.
Q 24Why can plant-based alternatives not be sold as 'yogurt' in the European Union?
The word is reserved for animal-origin foods
The word is reserved for animal-origin foods: EU law keeps dairy names such as milk, butter and yogurt for products derived from milk, as the Court of Justice confirmed in the 2017 TofuTown case.
Q 25In parts of the Balkans and Anatolia, yogurt has traditionally been made by adding what to warm milk?
Red wood ants
Red wood ants, dropped live into warm milk, supply formic acid that sours it and carry bacteria that ferment it, a practice recorded in Bulgarian villages.
Q 26Which yogurt, one of Hindu ritual's five panchamrita elixirs, is named from the Sanskrit for 'sour milk'?
Dahi
Dahi, named from the Sanskrit dadhi for sour milk, is the curd set from boiled milk with a spoonful of the previous batch as starter, and one of the five panchamrita ingredients.
Q 27Lassi, the blended yogurt drink, is traditionally associated with which Indian region?
Punjab
Punjab is the traditional home of lassi, which blends yogurt with water and is served either sweet with sugar or salted with roasted cumin.
Q 28Shrikhand, the western Indian dessert of strained yogurt, is flavoured with sugar and which spices?
Saffron, cardamom and nutmeg
Saffron, cardamom and nutmeg perfume the sweetened strained curd; with mango pulp blended in, shrikhand becomes amrakhand.
Q 29Ayran, the salty yogurt drink, is a national drink of which country?
Turkey
Turkey is ayran's home, where the blend of yogurt, cold water and salt is served with kebabs and sold in cartons everywhere.
Q 30Zabadi, the yogurt of Egypt, is especially associated with which observance?
Ramadan fasting
Ramadan fasting is when zabadi comes into its own: Egyptians eat it at the pre-dawn suhoor meal in the belief that it wards off thirst through the daylight fast.