Yogurt Trivia
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56 free Yogurt trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 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 56 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 milk's sugar, lowers the pH and makes the casein proteins clump, 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?
Turkish
Turkish spells it yoğurt, with a soft g that modern Turkish barely sounds, while English, which borrowed the word in 1625, kept a hard g.
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 around 5000 BC by herders in Central Asia and which other region?
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is the usual candidate because its herders had domesticated goats and sheep by about 5000 BC; their stored milk is thought to have soured into curd by accident.
Q 06Which Roman author noted that 'barbarous nations' knew how to thicken milk into a pleasantly tart food?
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder recorded it in his Natural History; he died in AD 79 after taking ships across the Bay of Naples toward erupting Vesuvius.
Q 07Which Indian side dish of yogurt, chopped vegetables and spices is served to cool a fiery curry?
Raita
Raita is the cooling partner to spicy dishes, yet its Hindi name traces back to Sanskrit words meaning a pungent mustard pickle.
Q 08Which Nobel laureate credited yogurt for the long lives of Balkan peasants, popularising it across Europe?
Ilya Mechnikov
Ilya Mechnikov, working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, blamed ageing on poisons made by gut bacteria and prescribed soured milk to hold them back, a diet that became a craze.
Q 09Danone began in 1919 as a small yogurt business in which Spanish city?
Barcelona
Barcelona is where Isaac Carasso first sold his yogurt through pharmacies as a medicine; he named it Danone after his son Daniel, who later took the brand to France.
Q 10Kefir, the tangy fermented-milk cousin of yogurt, has its roots in which mountain region?
The Caucasus
The Caucasus is kefir's home; unlike yogurt it ferments at room temperature, and the mixed microbes living in its grains leave it with a faint fizz.
Q 11Which American health reformer popularised yogurt at his Battle Creek Sanitarium?
John Harvey Kellogg
John Harvey Kellogg believed yogurt's bacteria guarded the bowel against disease, so his sanitarium patients got it at both ends: some to eat and some as an enema.
Q 12Dannon's 1970s TV adverts linked yogurt to long life by filming aged villagers in which Soviet republic?
Georgia
Georgia was the setting; in one advert an 89-year-old villager eats Dannon, and the voice-over adds that this pleased his mother very much, for she was billed as 114.
Q 13Dannon won over Americans who found plain yogurt too tart by launching which format?
Fruit on the bottom
Q 21Which yogurt brand's flower logo was drawn with six petals, one for each founding French dairy cooperative?
Yoplait
Yoplait began in 1965 when six French dairy cooperatives joined forces, coining the name by blending two of their existing brands, Yola and Coplait.
Q 22The name Yakult was coined from 'jahurto', the word for yogurt in which language?
Esperanto
Esperanto supplied the name: Minoru Shirota adapted jahurto for the drink he launched in 1935, built on a bacterial strain he had selected because it survives stomach acid.
Q 23Which Danone yogurt was launched in France in 1987 under the name 'Bio' before being rebranded?
Activia
Activia started out as 'Bio'; Danone had to drop that name after European rules kept 'bio' for organic food, which the yogurt was not.
Fruit on the bottom put a layer of sweet fruit under Dannon's plain yogurt; sales grew so quickly that the firm left its Bronx plant for a larger one in Long Island City.
Q 14Kept warm at about 40°C, cultured milk usually sets into yogurt over which stretch of time?
Several hours
Several hours is the window, usually 4 to 12 at 30–45 °C: the cultures work faster the warmer they are kept, and dairies running near 43 °C finish in about four.
Q 15Where does 'set-style' yogurt ferment, unlike stirred yogurt, which ferments in a tank?
In the pot it's sold in
In the pot it's sold in: set-style yogurt is filled into its retail container before it ferments, so the curd is never broken, while stirred yogurt is cultured in bulk and stirred smooth.
Q 16Straining yogurt through cloth removes what to make it thicker?
Whey
Whey, the watery part of milk left when the curd forms, drains away through the cloth; what stays behind is thicker, tangier and higher in protein.
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: in Fage v Chobani the English courts ruled, and confirmed on appeal in 2014, that shoppers take 'Greek yoghurt' to mean yogurt from Greece, so US-made Chobani had to drop the name.
Q 18Under which brand name did Greek company Fage import strained yogurt to Britain in the 1980s?
Total
Total is still the name on Fage's strained yogurt; when rival Chobani reached British shops in 2012, Fage took it to court over the wording on its pots and won.
Q 19Chobani began after Hamdi Ulukaya saw a shuttered yogurt plant advertised where?
In junk mail
In junk mail: the ad offered an old Kraft factory in South Edmeston, New York; Ulukaya binned it, fished it back out, toured the plant the next day and bought it with a small-business loan.
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 promised to Chobani's employees in April 2016, with each grant sized by length of service and paid out when the company is sold or goes public.
Q 24What stops plant-based alternatives being sold as 'yogurt' in the EU?
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 the microbes that ferment it, a folk method now studied by food scientists.
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 where lassi began; traditionally it comes in a kulhar, a handleless clay cup made to be thrown away after one use, sometimes with clotted cream spooned on top.
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 curd; in one popular legend, herders strained their yogurt to carry it overnight, then added sugar when it turned sharp.
Q 29Ayran, the salty yogurt drink, is a national drink of which country?
Turkey
Turkey claims ayran as a national drink: in 2013 prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared the blend of yogurt, water and salt the country's true drink, in contrast to beer.
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.