Swiss yogurt is thinner than the popular Greek version.
Since he was 6 years old, Markus Candinas wished he could eat a yogurt in the United States that tasted like the kind he ate when his family traveled to visit relatives in Switzerland.
Decades and a successful chocolatier career later, Candinas finally has the yogurt he wants — because he made it himself. This spring Candinas’ Yodelay Swiss-style yogurt arrived on store shelves in the Madison area, filling a niche in an increasingly international yogurt market.
When he started Candinas there was no one other than Godiva making high-end chocolates “and I could pretty much make the product I wanted to make,” Candinas says of the Verona-based chocolate company he founded in 1994. “I wanted to make chocolate as good as it could be done, as good as in Europe or better.
“Yogurt was the same. It was about not compromising and making the product I wanted to make because that would make me happy.”
Candinas believes that Yodelay is the only U.S.-made Swiss yogurt on the market. Also called stirred yogurt, Swiss yogurt is in some ways the opposite of the thick, high-protein Greek yogurt that has invaded the dairy case in recent years. Swiss yogurt is thinner.
Yodelay neither drains the whey from the yogurt nor adds stabilizers for thickness. It’s fruit-heavy, and Yodelay’s first flavors include rhubarb, peach-raspberry, sour cherry and pineapple, along with the more common blueberry, raspberry and strawberry.
If Swiss-style yogurt is unfamiliar to people, Candinas says, that can work in his favor. “Every time there was a new yogurt — and there were a lot of new yogurts — I got really excited and thought, ‘Maybe this is what I’ve been waiting for,’” he says. “Then I’d try it and realize it wasn’t. Now I realize that’s a good thing. There’s still room for me.”
Candinas, who studied and apprenticed his chocolate trade in his parents’ native Switzerland for six years, started learning about yogurt in 2003. He worked with the Center for Dairy Research at UW-Madison and took the cultured dairy short course there. Finding the right milk was key, too, and he found some with a perfect pedigree for his product: Brown Swiss cow milk, higher in butterfat and protein than more common Holstein milk.
Milk for Yodelay comes from Voegeli Farms, which is well known in the state’s dairy industry. The sixth-generation family farm between New Glarus and Monticello has been milking registered Brown Swiss since 1895. It is currently owned by Bryan and Jimmy Voegeli (who is perhaps better known for his band, the Jimmys). Their father, Howard, was one of the founders of the World Dairy Expo.
“Once I met the Voegelis and learned more about the breed, everything started making sense,” Candinas says.
Candinas’ Swiss yogurt is coming to the market at a time when international yogurts are getting lots of attention. Monroe’s Klondike Cheese Company has made its mark with its award-winning Odyssey Greek Yogurt. An Icelandic-style yogurt called Smari, thick like Greek yogurt and high protein, is made at Westby Cooperative. A Colorado company, Noosa, has had success with its creamy Australian-style yogurt.
Yodelay makes yogurt at its 10,000-square-foot plant on Latham Drive on Madison’s south side. The yogurt is sold in 17 area stores, including Hy-Vee, Jenifer Street Market, Metcalfe’s Market and Regent Market Co-op.
After 14 years of planning and experimenting, Candinas is confident consumers will be swayed by the flavor of the thinner yogurt, and he’s eager to see his love for it spread.
“Ten years ago there was no Greek yogurt anywhere but Greece,” he says. “Now it’s just exploded. They got out there and got people to give it a try, they told the story, and that’s what we have to do, too.”
