May 31, 2024

TruJoy Yogurt Celebrates its First Birthday!

It’s wild to believe that we have taken a full trip around the sun since we first stocked the freezers at Roy Pope Grocery in Fort Worth. A year in now, our Frozen Greek Yogurt can be found in nearly 100 stores across Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana & Missouri! We have shared our delicious and healthy treats with so many wonderful people. We truly love our customers.  It is their love, support, encouragement and smiles that allow us to wake up every morning to do something we truly love.

No Matter What, There is Always a Reason to Smile!

Our first birthday is an obvious reason to smile, but sometimes in life the reason to smile isn’t quite so obvious. Maybe you’re having bad day at work, a family member is sick or you’re going through a rough patch in a relationship, but you need to pause for a bit must remind yourself there is always a reason to smile and be joyful. That reason doesn’t need to be as extravagant as a Caribbean vacation, it can be something as simple as a cup of coffee with a friend or just knowing that you have a pint of TruJoy Yogurt waiting for you at home!  It’s often the most simple of things that make us the happiest.

But seriously, we do have so much to be grateful for and joyful about. Sometimes you just have to slow down, tune out the noise and reflect. As a symbolic little reminder of this, we have hidden a smiley face amongst the seemingly arbitrary squiggles that decorate our pints. The squiggles, though playful and decorative, represent all the distractions and clutter that keep us from truly being happy and content. Squint your eyes though and look carefully through the clutter and you will see the smile!

If you’ve been following TruJoy Yogurts journey so far, you are probably very familiar with our mission - to make the world a happier and healthier place by making the healthy choice the easy one. Health extends so far beyond the food, nutrition and exercise. Happiness is as crucial to your health and well-being as anything. It is important to press pause in our busy lives and carve out a bit of time to spend with those we love. Your simple smile will bring joy to all of those around you!

What Makes a Blueberry Parfait

Something feels wrong about playing favorites, but Blueberry Parfait has a special place in my heart. It’s an obvious play on one of the most ubiquitous breakfasts, something that can be found anywhere from a humble continental breakfast buffet to an upscale café. This universal breakfast now has a new home - your freezer!

To make TruJoy Yogurt’s Blueberry Parfait, we simply freeze our plain Frozen Greek Yogurt Base, akin to a Sweet Cream Base, fold in some crunchy granola and layer in ribbons of blueberry. The jammy Blueberry Swirl adds just the right amount of sweetness to compliment the yogurts tang. And the juxtaposition of the crunch against the creaminess of our Frozen Greek Yogurt rounds it all out!

The choice for which Granola we use was not something I took lightly. It was important that our Granola not only met TruJoy’s standards for high quality and clean ingredients, it also needed to be allergen free so that everybody can enjoy it. I tried dozens of different granolas before I finally found Jessica's Natural Foods Vanilla Maple Granola. This delicious granola adds depth and a perfect crunch. Working with Jessica and her team has been nothing but a joy and if you love our Blueberry Parfait, I’d encourage you to try some of her other delicious flavors of granola!

Coming Up

We are excited to be participating in KeHE’s (one of our distributor’s) New@KeHE program next month. While we don’t know exactly where this will take us, we are optimistic that we will land in a number of new independent retailers’ freezers across our current distribution area! If our New@KeHE launch is successful, we will soon be opening up more distribution centers across the country, sowing the seeds for growth into larger chains! We don’t know exactly where we will land with this program, but either way June will be full of excitement, which we look forward to sharing with you next month!

A year ago, TruJoy Yogurt was once nothing but a dream, sharing that dream with so many people now has been nothing if it hasn’t been a true joy!

Truly & Joyfully,

Charlie

The Lagniappe

I’d like to share one of my favorite songs, Scarlet Begonias by The Grateful Dead, with you and dig into a couple of lines from these beautiful verses. It’s a song about aimlessly bumbling about in the cold and finding beauty and love somewhere you least expect. The lines that have always popped to me are:

“Once in a while, you get shown the light, In the strangest places if you look at it right”

This is a little reminder, like the hidden smiles on our pints, that there is light, beauty and happiness everywhere, you just need to look at it right! Maybe this song is another one of The Grateful Dead’s whimsical and nonsensical jams, or maybe it is deeply profound. Either way, I encourage you to give it a listen!