A Small Treatise on Yoplait Yogurt Containers
Jul 16, 2010 by Jared Smith
Yoplait Light Yogurt containers suck! This product container was designed by Satan as a punishment for all who, like me, withdraw from the powers of bacon and Zingers to tempt their fates at dieting.
The Lid
The foil seal requires a small handtool, teeth, and/or ultra-tiny fingers to remove. And it always spurts just a bit of yogurt on you when you open it. This was clearly only tested by midget mechanic vampires at sea level.
(NOTE: For your own mental well-being, do not for the love of all that is good and holy perform a Google image search for “midget mechanic vampires”. What has been seen cannot be unseen.)
The lid contains the expiration date. It is also the first item discarded. This makes it particularly difficult to determine until after the fact that the odd-tasting yogurt you found at the back of your grandmother’s refrigerator was in fact 6 years old, rather than just fat free.
The Inside Design
The inside flange under the human-proof foil seal traps approximately 1/3 of the yogurt contents. Attempts to remove this with your tongue result in you looking and feeling like a fat idiot – something yogurt eaters are naturally trying to avoid.
Unless you eat with a Q-tip, this design sucks!
Another 1/3 of the contents is trapped in the deep ridges at the convex bottom of the container.
The advantage to this design is that you expend all 100 calories you’ve consumed trying to extricate the remaining yogurt from its furrowed safety grooves.
The Fake Bottom
Ain’t that a rip in the shorts? They call it Yoplait Light because the container is in fact 31% air.
The Container Shape
As are many people that eat yogurt, the container is wider at the bottom than at the top. Several minutes of intensive research involving an oddly-worded Google search resulted in the lyrics to a Sir Mix-a-Lot song, a J-Lo photo album, and several interesting facts about this design.
First, the shape masks the false bottom. If you look into an empty container, it appears much deeper than it is. I’ve concluded that the engineers at Yoplait have found a way to distort both time and space. The thing appears to go on forever as if you were peering into an eternal worm-hole of cultured pasteurized grade A nonfat milk and high fructose corn syrup goodness – in other words, heaven. And when you eat from it, you’d think there is an unending supply, when in fact nearly 2/3 of every spoonful is actually scraped off by the narrow opening at the lid, thus magnifying the deception.
Second, the containers are impossible to stack. Jeffrey Howard of Wilson Elementary School won the Yoplait cup stacking competition last year by getting three of them stacked on end. Amazing!
Third, the container kills skunks.
Apparently health conscious skunks everywhere are getting their heads stuck in the container after futilely attempting, like you, to get all that remaining yogurt out of the bottom. There are several entertaining YouTube videos of this phenomena. I have summarily scattered several more-or-less empty containers about the yard and have the video camera ready.
PETA has protested and boycotted Yoplait and there are several damning posts on environmental forums such as treehugger.com – for which I have declared myself a lifetime Yoplait customer.
There’s even a Facebook group titled “Guys Against Yoplait” or G.A.Y. as they appropriately call it. The 9 male and (inexplicably) 1 female members (ironically all members of the Olfactory Dysfunction Support Group) describe this situation as “an epidemic sweeping our nation” caused by “cup ‘o death”. Their mantra is (exclamation marks maintained for impact) “Skunks are our friends!! We must protect them at all costs!!!”
This article describes how “between 2 and 14 skunks were reported killed” in 1997, which is approximately the number of skunks I kill per year with my truck, though I’ve yet to have a hippie chain himself to it (the hippies I’ve chained to it do not count, naturally). The article explains how General Mills spent “10 months of intensive research” to primarily add a warning label to their containers which reads:
PROTECT WILDLIFE CRUSH
CUP BEFORE DISPOSAL
which if you read just right is kinda funny and nonsensical, though not nearly as much so as spending 10 months to come up with that.
Yoplait Will Kill You
The label on Yoplait yogurt is like Kate Gosselin’s reverse mullet – party in the front, business in the back. There are more warning labels than a barrel of plutonium. It contains warnings for things like Phenylalanine, which the internets says causes brain damage. It contains kosher gelatin, which I have no idea what it does, but I’m pretty sure it’s made of Jewish horses.
And that’s just the beginning, or so claims this post on a conspiracy theory forum, obviously written by some loser that has nothing better to do than write a long blog post about yogurt.
17 Responses to “A Small Treatise on Yoplait Yogurt Containers”
Great post. As someone who has gone through the dieting game recently, I also know how you can suddenly turn a strange dislike like the shape of a yogurt container into a thousand word diatribe. I started beating my kids after two weeks of dieting. I do have to note the disappointment in the dead skunk photo and then the seeing the picture of Kate Gosselin, I was hoping she was also killed by Yoplait
By Mark on Jul 17, 2010
Wow, this diet thing has turned you into a crazy. I love Yoplait but I have to agree with you on the whole container thing I don’t think I have ever opened one without it spitting on me. I do love your comment about the hippies chained to your truck. I can’t imagine how your neighbors will love you when you actually trap those skunks and the fill your house with spray. I’m sure the odor will help the yogurt taste so much better.
By mom on Jul 17, 2010
For heaven sake.. against yoplait? This is about taking down business at all cost. And no doubt jobless hippies are behind it.
By Rogue Spyware on Jul 18, 2010
Ah- I needed a good laugh tonight. Thanks, Baboo.
By Kristin on Jul 20, 2010
Very funny, and spot on.
By Chad on Sep 20, 2010
I found your article whilst looking for some ideas on what can be done with these empty Yoplait containers. I recently started eating yogurt again after many years of not being able to eat it due to the fact that I believed that I had eaten my entire yogurt quota while I was in highschool in the 1970s. Now, I have tried various brands while living in Iowa, and settled on the local dairy’s product (A&E) as it was the only one distributed there with an actual lid, making the container reusable for many purposes (in my case, creating single-servings from large ice cream containers, thus counter-acting any dieting benefits I may have seen from eating yogurt ). However, having moved to the South, I have found that all brands here have switched to the evil foil top favored by Yoplait. Well, as the flavors offered by Yoplait seemed appetizing (chocolate, for goodness sakes!) and I had a coupon for 40 cents off six, which was doubled by Kroger’s to 80 cents of six (and Yoplait was already on sale), I decided to stock up on Yoplait. I quickly came to the same conclusion that Yoplait containers were designed with pure evil in mind. Thank you for your rant, as it reveals my own frustrations exactly… from the lid to the lip to the trick bottom and on to the wildlife warning.
By Victoria on Apr 16, 2011
I hate the way its so easy to pick up the junky yoplait light, instead of regular. The light has aspartame which is carcinogenic! Also is has high fructose corn syrup which is bad for you.
By telsa21 on Jul 2, 2011
You forgot to mention that it WILL cut your tongue if you do try to get to that 1/3 stuck under the damn flange!
By ALE on Aug 28, 2011
I believe wars have been started over less. And I’m ready to mount an offensive against Yoplait. Simply fill an empty Yoplait container with whatever handy vermin gets stuck in it (skunk, squirrel, hippy) and then load it onto a catapult and shoot them at the headquarters.
Christ! Why not just make the container slightly larger at the top, eliminate the ridiculous rim, and everyone is happy. We can get out the last spoonful, animals and homeless people can lick the container without getting stuck in one, Yoplait can still build a false bottom in there to rip us off. It’s a win-win.
By oldestgenxer on Mar 25, 2013
I have noticed that the container will not fall over when it is empty and has a metal spoon in it. Other containers fall over when you put it down and makes a mess. I think that’s why the bottom is wider than the top.
By Bryon on Feb 16, 2014
You nailed it! I mentally complain about that rediculous container every time I have one.
By Jim on Aug 22, 2014
I realize the original blog entry is four years old, but I HAD to comment. I was almost laughing out loud at your excellent analysis of the Yoplait(tm) container. I recently reviewed Yoplait Greek 100 yogurt in an email to my wife, after we had bought some (on sale) to try.
That container, while wider at the top, similar to other brand’s Greek yogurt containers, so you actually can get all the yogurt out. Still it was ridiculously hard to open and exhibited the typical Yoplait spitting behavior. I always warn my kids to hold their spoon in front of the container to catch the yogurt that spits out.
By brian4xp on Sep 12, 2014
SPOT. ON.
This container design is the single worst product package I have ever encountered, and I speak as one who was recently hospitalized and had to extricate all my condiments, silverware, etc. out of pouches evidently designed by aliens. I will never purchase Yoplait again, because I do not want to contribute to the paycheck of anyone stupid and/or arrogant enough to think that they did a competent job on the container.
By Sandy on May 6, 2015
I pin prick the top to keep it from spurting when open. And I’m no ashamed to admit I use a finger to scoop out the remaining yogurt under the lid. As for the day’m foil lid, I’ve gotten the hang of using my fingernail to lift it up all the way around the sides. Then it opens easily. At any mix of flavors 10 for $5.00 at S&F it’s worth the aggravation.
And I eat the regular for the probiotics – not the diet – so stay away from that HFCS, carcinogen loaded “Light” version.
Cheers!
By Shawn on May 13, 2015
Yoplait containers are retarded. They were designed by a complete moron. I just know their sales would increase 10-20% if they flipped the taper and put the lip on top toward the outside. I don’t buy them. Every few years I get some free somewhere and I am reminded how stupid they are.
By pcdec on Dec 12, 2015
Scrape as much as you can with your spoon. Then use a clean finger and you can get nearly all of it out. Your welcome.
By jamie on Apr 5, 2022
I like to add stuff to my yogurt like chia seeds, flax, or nuts. Maybe even throw in some berries on occasion. Because of the tiny opening on the Yoplait containers, it’s extremely difficult to do this and it usually ends up in a mess. I more or less don’t buy the product beacause of this. Every once in a while I am forced to buy it because the grocery store is sold out of other brands, or I buy it because it’s a loss leader and the store is selling it for 17 cents. Each of those times, I am reminded about why I don’t buy this product.
By Mike on Aug 4, 2023