Inexpensive self-serve yogurt shops are quite common in United States, such as a chain originally from Korea known as “Pinkberry”. Here in Taipei they seem to charge significantly more, comparable to the price difference between dairy milk and soy milk at the supermarket. Part of the enjoyment of the simple, humble, ice-cream cone or bubble tea is in the price, but at the self-serve shops here, their mark-up might be alienating larger numbers. So, any recommendations? Cheers 
It’s all about the impression of being good, special … high price means good, basically all ‘western’ style stuff has a huge mark-up, cheeses, chocolate, jam, ice-cream … it’s luxury.
Start your own!
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I cannot, but yes, you’re right…it’s time for someone to present this in a different way. A Pinkberry-like experience at half the current price…the lines would surely form. I suspect the sourness of plain yogurt doesn’t work as well on the Taiwanese palette, but adjusting to local bias to avoid sour would not be a problem.
Recently 7-11 in Taipei rolled out soft ice cream servers similar to the yogurt kind, and Taipei, in typical fashion, seems to be taking to it like a new trend. Really is time to open something for a year or so until the trend dies down. Not interesting enough personally but there’s market opportunity there to be seized upon. We’ll see.
A lot of people just aren’t that into dairy-based foods in Taiwan.
You need brand and marketing power here.
I just want to point out that dairy stuff here is expensive, as well as many other food, because they have not enough cows/crops/local production for covering all the demand, being necessary to import a lot. According to my gf, one of the big brands here uses milk from Taiwan, but… I’ve seen like 3 cows in more than 3 years I’ve been here, and one of them was actually a buffalo 
… too sell crap to lining up masses …
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I’ve never eaten it. Why would you freeze yoghurt? Is it like icecream but nicer?
There are lots of cows in Miaoli, Xinzhu, Taidong, some central mountain range places but yes not enough, they can set the prices … it’s a sellers market, not a buyres market … in Europe milk prices were dictated by the huge companies to the farmers but overproduction kept prices low … now, China wants more of the milk puddle in Europe. Prices of 3.5 € per liter are not unheard of in China … that’s for UHT brickpack … not fresh from the cow.
And yogurt is massacred by adding all kinds of stabelizers and other crap that doesn’t belong in yogurt.
A while ago I had some self-serve frozen yogurts at Taipei main station … never again, expensive crap … the best thing on it were the nuts and dried berries.
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Frozen yoghurt is tart.
Tart tart tart. That’s what it’s all about it.
Still don’t like it?
The American softer version is more akin to ice cream.
BTW, most Americans have never eaten fresh yoghurt until recently , and drinking yoghurt is pretty much unknown.
Unfrozen yogurt is tart. Does it have fewer calories than icecream or something?
Not the yogurt you find in stores … they add sugar and gelling agent, stabilizers, fake fruit jelly … yogurt can be tart but doesn’t need to be, depending on the strain of culture, production time, temperature.
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Yes frozen yoghurt should be healthier…but they balance the acidity with sugar so it often isn’t.
Interesting points above on dairy culture in TW. What 7-11 here in Taipei is now offering is very inexpensive like the Asian soft serve frozen yogurt chains in California (and perhaps elsewhere in US). It’s surfaced in various forms before in the US over 2-3 decades now, almost always touted as a healthier alternative to ice cream, though not always true. At any rate, we have it in TW, but it’s ridiculously expensive. 7-11 on the other hand, is doing well with what they offer at a much more enjoyable price. Gelato, ice cream, frozen yogurt…these are small, simple pleasures and scaling the price up seems ridiculous…robbing the fun. Italians in Berlin have sold mountains of gelato in the warmer months on countless street corners, cheap.
Not about frozen crap yogurt … just a few days ago I bought some ‘living’ yogurt from Breeze Super … put three table spoons in milk and put it in my cheapo yogurt maker … 5 hours later I had yummy selfmade yogurt, could have done a little longer to get it a somewhat fermer tho. I took out and reserved some from what I made for the next batch and will let you know in a week or so how it turned out. Normally I could go on continuesly making yogurt from the same strain. BTW, the yogurt I bought was 150 NT$ … now I make double for half the price. The yogurt makers you can buy in many second hand stores for less than 100NT$ as no one really knows how to use them or actually don’t want because there is some work involved, like sterilizing your utensils before making it. But hey, the square milk packs fit right into it … there are other types of yogurt makers out there too … and no, you don’t need to buy expensive prepacked powdered and flavoured yogurt cultures.
You can’t even call it yogurt because the product is processed, pasteurized to kill all the bad bugs but than the good ones or killed too … it’s sour frozen sugared milk with additives and colorants, thickening agents, stabilizers, jeez … nothing is alive in there.
True! Even as a child, I couldn’t fathom what this soft sugar-filled icy substance described as ‘yogurt’ had in common with other yogurts we knew.