Stonyfield Farms was gracious enough to offer Kitchen Stewardship a sample of Yobaby for review.  My son was so excited!  He had recently been asking why we never get the little cups of yogurt anymore, so it was fun to be able to give him a special treat.  They were great to have around when we packed lunches for trips to the zoo and such, but I still tended to serve my homemade yogurt when we were at home.

Yobaby is designed for infants and toddlers 6 months and up.  It’s made with whole milk so babies get those good whole fats, and it’s also USDA certified organic, so you don’t have to worry about the cows receiving antibiotics or artificial growth hormones, plus no pesticides on the cows’ food.  (Most sources say it’s important to seek out organic sources of meat and milk, because any chemicals the animals eat are more concentrated in their meat than if we just ate the corn and grain ourselves.)  Yobaby also is made from unhomogenized milk.  Homogenization puts milk’s fats through some pretty intense damage, and some research points to it as a factor in heart disease, so this is a big one.  Some varieties are fortified with baby cereal and DHA, the omega-3 fat found in breastmilk that supports brain development.  Stonyfield marked its 10th birthday this year by reformulating Yobaby to include Vitamin D and zinc, both known to boost immunity and promote the development of strong bones and teeth.

What’s in Yobaby?

The side of the cup claims Yobaby is “100% natural – no artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives.”  On another cup, they say, “Everything you want and nothing you don’t.” I might disagree with that statement after analyzing the ingredients, however.

Ingredients: (strawberry-banana w/cereal and DHA) cultured pasteurized organic whole milk, naturally milled organic sugar, organic strawberry puree, organic banana puree, organic oat flour, organic flaxseed concentrate, organic rice flour, organic oat bran, fish oil (anchovy oil, sardine oil, tilapia fish gelatin: a natural source of DHA), natural flavor, organic beet juice concentrate (for color), pectin.
Contains our exclusive blend of 6 live and active cultures, including L acidophilus, bifidus, l. casei, and l. rhamnosus

Vanilla only has four ingredients, which is great:   cultured pasteurized organic whole milk, naturally milled organic sugar, Vanilla flavor (but notice it’s not necessarily pure vanilla extract, the good stuff!!), pectin.

I’m disappointed that the 2^nd ingredient is “naturally milled organic sugar“, a fancy way of saying “white sugar grown without chemicals”.  It looks like Stonyfield Farms is aware that moms might be watching out for sugar, because there’s an asterisk by the sugar on the nutrition facts telling us that the total includes “natural milk sugars”.  But do they reduce the amount of sugar in their baby yogurt vs. adult yogurt? I checked Stonyfield Farm French Vanilla Yogurt (which a friend tells me is divine and tastes like frosting, for those of you who hate yogurt!  She tried some after being inspired to take a baby step at this post.). It has 30g of sugar in one cup, only 4g more than Yobaby.  Their plain, unsweetened yogurt has 13g of sugar in a cup, just slightly more than milk but twice as much as Yobaby. (I’m not exactly sure why a cup of yogurt has more sugar than a cup of milk, but perhaps when some whey is poured off, the milk sugars are more concentrated in the yogurt that’s left.)

Sugar Breakdown

Photo Source

So how much white sugar is most likely in a 4 oz. cup of Yobaby yogurt? Here are my calculations:

• There are 13g of sugar in 4 oz. (1/2 cup) of yogurt (in all flavors, even vanilla).
• A half cup of whole milk has 5.5 g of sugar.
• A half cup of plain yogurt has 6.5 g of sugar.
• 13g – 6.5 = 6.5g
• A tsp of white sugar has 4g sugar, so it’s possible that’s there’s almost a teaspoon and a half of sugar in the tiny 4 oz. cup.  Even if there is only one teaspoon, that’s as much sugar as my husband adds to an entire cup of yogurt for himself.  Too much for babies, in my opinion!

*Note:  I notice on the website that Stonyfield offers Yobaby in “Simply Plain”, which only has 6g of sugar, but my local store did not carry it.

The Taste Test Results

And how did my kids like the yogurt, you ask?  Buddy Boy was thrilled to have the treat and ate it up the first few times, but after a while he started not finishing the cup.  He always eats about ¾ cup of yogurt with fruit when I serve my homemade stuff, so this isn’t a habit for him.  My hunch is that he mentally liked the idea of fruity yogurt in a little cup at first, but then didn’t like the actual yogurt as much.  He definitely wasn’t a fan of the cereal-enhanced style, but then again he’s much too old for baby cereal.

Lovey Girl, the perfect age for Yobaby at just under a year, has never eaten more than three bites of any flavor.  She makes a funny face, the same one she made when she had sugary frosting at her first birthday party.  I think it’s so much sweeter than anything she’s used to.  I give my kids plain old yogurt, which would only have the natural milk sugars and any fruit sugars I add in.

The Straw Breaks my Back…Number 6 Plastic

I was starting to feel badly about the negative review that was shaping up for Yobaby, and then I made one more discovery.  I was at a friend’s and asked about recycling, flipping the cup over to doublecheck the plastic recycle symbol as I talked.  My eyes nearly popped out of my head and I shrieked, “What!?!  Number SIX!?!” I wasn’t bummed that it couldn’t be recycled; our community accepts all numbers.  But if you’ve been around KS long enough, you’ve seen the little mnemonic for safe plastics: “2, 4, 5, stayin’ alive.”  Six is most definitely NOT on the safe plastics list.  (See this Food for Thought for more info on plastics.)  And I’ve been feeding this stuff to my children?!  I’m used to singleton plastic yogurt cups being number 5, but I checked other brands of cups that are attached together, and they are also number 6.  I’m not happy about that.

Hazards of Plastic Number 6

Six is polystyrene, a.k.a. Styrofoam, and although we get our takeout food in such containers, it’s really not rated to be safe for food.  I doublechecked online and found numerous sources stating that styrene can leach.  The dangers of styrene include hormone disruption (always good for infants and toddlers, right?) and carcinogenic (cancer-causing) compounds. Fabulous.  (I’ll post later with more details and sources.)  I always feel that if it’s a liquid involved, the leaching of chemicals is probably worse because of the constant contact between the surface area of the food and the container.  Like, you’d eat a cracker you dropped on your kitchen floor, but not a spoonful of chili, right?  Also, research says that higher fat foods leach more.  Whole milk yogurt.  Great.

Anyone interested in a little letter/email writing campaign to major companies to end the use of number 6 plastic in yogurt/cottage cheese cups?  (Kraft Foods’ Breakstone Cottage Cheese singletons and Dannon’s break-apart style yogurts are the same.)

The Breakdown:  Pros and Cons

* One flavor choice is strawberry banana, but strawberries aren’t generally recommended for babies under one year.  That means you can’t get the strawberry flavor, which is attached to the peach, so you can’t get peach if you haven’t introduced strawberries.  Bummer.

In case you’re still interested in Yobaby, Stonyfield Farms (unless they disown me for this review) is offering some fun prizes for my readers.  Click on to the giveaway for details. (If it were me, I’d sign up for the giveaway and find somewhere that sold the “plain” yogurt, because you can’t beat organic, unhomogenized whole milk yogurt for good nutrition!!)

This post is entered in Homemaker Monday at 11th Heaven’s Homemaking Haven.