AS AMERICAN AS YOGURT
In the Public View
by Hrag Vartanian
Who would've guessed that the kitchen of Rose and Sarkis Colombosian would give rise to one of the most important ingredients of America's health food revolution? "They certainly didn't have any idea. My father died in 1966 so he didn't see any of the growth really. My mother saw most of it, she was around until 1981," retired yogurt man and son of the founders, Bob Colombosian responds.
Bob Colombosian sold Colombo Yogurt to General Mills in 1977 but recently he has been coaxed out of retirement to become an integral part of a new television ad campaign that has appeared on CBS, NBC and FOX in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Chicago.
"General Mills called and invited my wife and I out to dinner in Boston. A few weeks later they called and asked if I wanted to be in a commercial. Eventually, they integrated my wife, Alice, and the rest is history. When they asked for my input, I wanted to emphasize that it was an Armenian company when it started and they agreed with all that. In the first ad, I had a little bit of Armenian such as, Assiga shad hamov eh [This is very delicious]. They let me do those things and they let me show Armenia on the map. The Colombo name sounds Italian, so I emphasized the Colombosian," he explains about the first ad that has made him a household face in many places in the country.
Speaking to Mr. Colombosian you sense he is taking all of the newfound fame in stride, "It depends where I go, they all recognize me but it's ok. They look at me kind of funny and I say 'I'm the person you're thinking about'."
It is strange to think that when Mr. Colombosian's parents, originally from Chunkoosh, in Turkish Armenia, began making yogurt in 1929 at the small Colombo and Sons Creamery in Andover, Massachusetts, it would become a staple of the American diet—as American as apple pie.
He describes the difficulty his parents experienced in the early years, "They struggled, they had a little farm and one or two cows when they started. They had a garden and they would deliver vegetables and everything else with the yogurt—which was selling for 10 cents a quart with a nickel deposit.
"Mostly ethnic people bought it when we introduced it in the early 30's, like Greeks, Italians, Jews. It was very low volume and it was plain, natural yogurt back then with a cream top because it was before they had homogenization. It didn't pick up until 1950 when a big article in Reader's Digest by Dr. Gaylord Hauser appeared about how good yogurt was for you and how it made you live longer. That was the turning point. Sales picked up, and no one knew how to make yogurt back then. A lot of these dairies were asking for it and they would call me up. I would be the only one around in the New England area so I'd get all of that business.
"My brother John and I moved the company to an industrial park in Methuen, Massachusetts in 1970, and from there it really started to fly. When we first moved I was doing $300,000 a year in sales in the old place and the first year we moved to the new place it hit a million and kept doubling after that," he says. The idea to introduce Colombo's distinctive frozen yogurt was Mr. Colombosian's idea back in 1973. At first, they brought in soft serve ice cream trucks and began going around college campuses and offering free samples—he knew the market would develop and it did.
Colombo Yogurt's recent marketing campaign, headed by advertising powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi, has drawn on Colombosian's folksy and all-American personality. The campaign is part of a larger trend that is becoming a national phenomenon. Frank Perdue of Perdue Farms and Dave Thomas of Wendy's have also been drafted into the U.S. ad wars selling their products on consumers hungry for a little bit of the homegrown.
What's Bob Colombosian's favorite yogurt flavor? "I still like the plain one." "Low-fat?" I ask. "Yeah, low fat but not the no fat variety," he admits.
"We kept having to add sugar to it so people would like it. Everything that is selling is fruit and sugar. But that's what the kids like and that's why they're going that way. It went against everything I believed in but if you want sales then you've got to do what the people want," he says.
Colombo's current success is a far cry from their humble beginnings. "The funny thing about it is that a lot of people, specially when I was going to school, would make fun of my brother and me because we had MADZOON [yogurt in Armenian] written on our delivery truck. Very few people knew what yogurt was at the time—let alone MADZOON! Now there is a whole new appreciation of our Armenian culture and ethnic foods, in particular. These same people want to associate themselves with an Armenian family that had the ingenuity to turn an idea into a health food phenomenon," Mr. Colombosian says.
Colombo Yogurt is sold throughout the American Northeast and Northwest and its frozen variety is available nationally and in a slew of countries around the world, including Switzerland, the Caribbean, and even Iceland.
Mr. Colombosian is still working with Saatchi & Saatchi and General Mills to make sure that Colombo Yogurt continues to succeed. New ads are in the works and if Mr. Colombosian gets his way, the whole country will know that it was Armenian American ingenuity that helped develop the American taste for yogurt.
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