National Greek Yogurt Day

History

The origin of this observance is not well documented. No founding organization, government page or news account establishes who created National Greek Yogurt Day or when it was first marked; the date appears to circulate through daily-holiday aggregators alone. The regulatory history of the product, though, is documented in detail.

Yogurt in the United States is governed by a federal standard of identity at 21 CFR 131.200. There is no equivalent standard for the thicker, higher-protein product sold as Greek yogurt. In a notice published January 15, 2025, the agency wrote: "There is not a separate SOI for high-protein yogurt, Greek yogurt, or Greek-style yogurt." It was a request for information, docket FDA-2024-N-5716, asking manufacturers to describe the processes and ingredients they use, on the stated ground that the existing standard "may not align with certain manufacturing processes and ingredients used to concentrate protein."

That notice is also the clearest official description of how the product is made, and the answer is that there is more than one way. One method is to concentrate yogurt after culturing to remove liquid whey by straining, which FDA notes "can be done in a traditional way using cheesecloth, but is more commonly done commercially using a centrifugal separator." A second adds milk-protein ingredients before culturing. A third concentrates milk protein by membrane ultrafiltration. All three can reach the shelf under the same name. FDA also records granting Chobani a temporary permit in March 2023 to market-test yogurt made with ultrafiltered nonfat milk as a basic dairy ingredient.

The gap is not new: FDA says manufacturers argued for an additional standard for strained, high-protein yogurt at a public meeting in 2019 and again in a reopened comment period in 2020. The agency's broader yogurt rulemaking, published June 11, 2021 and effective that July, revoked the separate standards for lowfat and nonfat yogurt and amended the yogurt standard in numerous respects. It did not create a Greek yogurt standard. Explaining the change, FDA noted that optional dairy protein ingredients let manufacturers reach the protein content Greek-style yogurt needs before fermentation, "without the production of the undesirable acid whey that is potentially a disposal problem."

How to observe

Read the ingredient list rather than the front of the tub. With no standard of identity for Greek yogurt, two containers carrying the name can be made by materially different processes, and the ingredients are where that shows. Milk and live cultures alone generally indicates a strained product; added milk protein concentrate or whey protein indicates protein built in rather than strained out.

Then compare protein and sugar across two brands at the same fat level and price. Protein density is the category's commercial logic, and the spread between brands is wider than the packaging implies.

The FDA's 2025 request for information is short and plainly written, and asks exactly what a curious reader would: what the methods are, how each changes the product, and what the result ought legally to be called. The docket and its comments are public.