I do love Yogurtland, the self-serve land of yogurt with about a dozen different flavors and every topping you can imagine. And their new pumpkin pie flavored frozen yogurt is really good! (Especially with some mini chocolate chips and a drizzle of caramel.) But the sign advertising the new pumpkin pie flavor drives me crazy. I walk past it every single day and it makes no sense at all.
Twice the real pumpkin, it says. But twice the real pumpkin compared to what? Other pumpkin flavored frozen yogurts? How can you prove that? Twice the real pumpkin of that piece of pumpkin pie? Twice the real pumpkin of a REAL PUMPKIN? Impossible! It doesn’t make sense! What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything!
Anyway, it bugs me. It’s been there for a couple weeks now, and it hasn’t stopped bothering me. Welcome to my world, where I can spend weeks thinking about the wording on a poster hanging in the window of a frozen yogurt shop.
Maybe twice what their old recipe had?
My best guess: They absolutely made that shit up.
My most generous guess: They had pumpkin-pie-flavored frozen yogurt last year with half as much real pumpkin in it.
Twice the minimum requirement of REAL PUMPKIN required by the FDA in your food product to say it tastes like pumpkin, which is to say, none at all. What’s two times zero?
Most advertising is complete bullshit. The sign should just say DELICIOUS, because that would be true.
jen graves mentioned this last week, i think.
Welcome to Marketing.
Is this like Real cheese?
No squash really has much flavor except what we add to it (butter and brown sugar on baked acorn squash, chopped herbs on steamed zucchini, etc.). Not that I’m complaining; I eat a lot of it, and love pumpkin pie.
But pumpkin pie should really be called”nutmeg-allspice-clove-cinnamon-ginger-flavored custard with squash filler.”
@7 – HALF AS MUCH AS WHAT??? You’re doing it tooooo!! Auuuughhhhhhhh!!
Believe it or not, people complained their last year’s Pumpkin special wasn’t particularly good. So their trumpeting that this year’s has “twice the real pumpkin” is to acknowledge their failure last year and to promise “still uses real pumpkin but we hope in a sufficient amount that you like it better”. Honestly, Yogurtland is pretty good about “real” meaning “the thing it says it is”.
Looks like Andy Rooney’s spirit is cursed to walk the earth, his only solace being to occasionally possess The Stranger’s writers and post on Slog.
Wow, deja vu! From Jen Graves on Oct. 31:
They got sick and tired of people complaining that there wasn’t enough pumpkin in their pumpkin yogurt last year.
It’s twice as much. I’m not sure what’s so hard to figure out about twice. You take the pumpkin inside and twice it, and there you have it. Twice pumpkin goo inside. Put it in your mouth. Twice as much of it!
You don’t realize it until you walk in but it is a “Buy One – Get One Free” kind of deal.
ta-da: Twice as much real pumpkin.
Why not ask them what it means? Half the effort of a Slog post!
@16 If Stranger writers actually took the time to ask about the things that annoy/interest them we would never have these delightful 2 Block Radius posts.
To me, the picture strongly suggests that it means twice as much pumpkin as there is in a slice of pumpkin pie.