Frozen Yogurt Chains Proliferate in the City
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The frozen yogurt war is heating up.
A local chain that has three shops in Manhattan and one in New Jersey has merged with the sandwich purveyor Lenny’s and plans to take on a wave of frozen yogurt competitors opening around the city.
Yolato, which combined its operations with those of Lenny’s two weeks ago, expects to open 30 new stores over the next three years, including three outposts in the city by the end of this year. In addition, executives are seeking to license Yolato Express kiosks inside other food chains in the city, the founder of Yolato, Donald Park, said.
“I couldn’t run it as a small mom-and-pop store anymore,” Mr. Park, a native of Palermo, Italy, said. “Now, we are going in all kinds of directions.”
Yolato’s chief competitor for yogurt dominance is Pinkberry, a Los Angeles-based chain that already has six stores in the city. Two weeks ago, Pinkberry received a $27.5 million infusion from a venture capital firm created by the founder of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, to grow its brand dramatically.
But that’s not all. By December, the South Korea-based Red Mango frozen yogurt chain will open three stores in the city. The president in charge of North American operations, Daniel Kim, said he plans to start opening 10 to 12 stores a year across America. Red Mango has 130 stores in South Korea.
“The frozen yogurt wars are starting to heat up in New York,” a principal of the Lenny’s Group, Johnny Heil, said.
The group will take over the infrastructure of Yolato, including site selection for new stores and the company’s finances, he said. Mr. Park, 31, and his co-founder, Francisco Barros, opened their first store in Edgeware, N.J., with money Mr. Park had made selling a financial business he ran for several years. The two came to America from Palermo, where they had launched several crepe bars when they were in their teens and early 20s. (Both men attended culinary school together, as well.) When they were first starting to generate ideas, Mr. Barros wanted to open a gelato store and Mr. Park wanted to open a frozen yogurt store.
“Then we thought, ‘Why don’t we just mix the two concepts together?'” Mr. Park said.
Yolato is nonfat yogurt mixed with skim milk and fresh fruit; the store also sells gelato and sorbets. Starting next month, the stores will also sell espresso drinks.
“We really think we can have a national footprint with his product,” the principal of Lenny’s Group, Mr. Heil, said.
Yolato may be the underdog in a market increasingly dominated by established chains, but it is by no means the smallest one. In the fro-yo wars, there is also at least one conscientious objector: öko, on Fifth Avenue in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.
“We are not really looking to take over the world or anything,” a co-owner, Helen Lee, said of the six-month-old store. “We just want to put out a really good all-natural product in an eco-friendly environment.”
Ms. Lee said she had no plans to open new ökos around the city.