Imagine mixing soda pop with yogurt or having a smoothie with bubbles of carbon dioxide fizzing on your tongue. Now you don't have to imagine anymore. The new concoction comes in six flavors, and it can be found in the grocery store in plastic tubes, thanks to the efforts of a BYU professor and General Mills.

Lynn Ogden first added carbon dioxide to yogurt in 1983. His wife, Laurel, said she didn't like the first product her husband made, but he kept working on it. After a while, her children started taking it to parties and events, and people started requesting the recipe.

"You have to do something with this," she told her husband.

After nearly 30 patents in as many countries, 10 years and two appeals to General Mills, the product, called Fizzix, is now on grocery store shelves.

"Nobody wanted to step up and be first," said Michael Alder, director of Brigham Young University's Technology Transfer Office, of efforts to license the product.

The carbonated yogurt is being sold nationwide. Ogden saw it first at a Smith's grocery store in Heber City.

Ogden first got the idea when thinking about making homemade root beer. If root beer was just concentrate, water, sugar and dry ice, that could happen with yogurt.

"I thought, 'Why not throw in a block of dry ice and see what happens?' " Ogden said.

He likes the bubbly taste.

"I think it makes yogurt taste more fresh," Ogden said. He said there is no sharp tingling sensation like there is with soft drinks. Ogden also said the carbonation won't change the healthy effects of the yogurt.

The product was sold for a time in the BYU Creamery. It even developed a following.

"We had people drive down from Idaho with coolers," Ogden said.

Lynn Astle is the former director of BYU's technology transfer office. He said Ogden came to him 10 years ago with a two-liter soda pop bottle full of the concoction and told him to taste it.

From then on, Astle was hooked. His favorite flavor is lemon, which is not produced commercially. It comes in blue raspberry rage, strawberry watermelon rush, wild cherry zing, strawberry lemonade jolt, triple berry fusion and fruit punch charge.

The school applied for patents in the United States and nearly 30 other countries.

"It's the most we've ever spent on a patent," Astle said. The school has spent about $500,000 on the patents.

After the royalties from Fizzix pay off the patent costs, Ogden could see a share of the profits.

When the product was finally licensed, Astle was relieved.

"It was kind of like a confirmation," Astle said. "We really did come up with a good product here."

To make carbonated yogurt, Ogden hooks a tank of liquid carbon dioxide to a tank of regular yogurt, and gas bubbles up from the bottom.

Most of the time the fizzy yogurt behaves itself. It exploded during development.

"Business like this is a little tricky," Ogden said during a demonstration, just as a bubble popped and splattered on him.

Packages of the new product should only explode during opening. Ogden recommended opening the package with your teeth while in your mouth, so it wouldn't get everywhere.

Brittani Lusk can be reached at 344-2549 or at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it