Cacao Green VS Tutti Frutti

Name: Cacao  Green
Location: Swanston St/Lonsdale St (285 Swanston St
Melbourne, 3000)
Price range: $6.5-12 frozen yoghurt (Junior sized tub with three toppings is $7.50. )
Overall score: 9/10 for frozen yoghurt, though it is a bit dear

Name: Tutti frutti
Location: QV Urban Market
Price range: $1.50/50g, by weight only
Overall score: 6/10 for frozen yoghurt, but luckily for Tutti Frutti its charm point doesn’t lie in its frozen yoghurt

Cacao green and Tutti Frutti are both frozen yoghurt places, both claiming health benefits from their products. The aim of this review is to compare and contrast Cacao Green and Tutti Frutti.

Nutritional Value:

Tutti Frutti has 16-20g sugar per serve  (depending on flavour), is fat-free for almost all of their flavours, and contains an average of 420kJ. The catch is, the serving sizes listed on TF’s website is a 89g serve. Let’s make all of this mathematical garble speak the same language. In 100g of Tutti Frutti frozen yoghurt, there is 18-23g sugar, fat-free (or negligible), and contains 470kJ.
Comparing this with Cacao Green, which do specify a serving size in their nutrition tables (100g), Cacao Green is low-fat, has 22g sugar on average, and contains 470kJ per serve.

So for the same serving size, they are pretty much the same in terms of fat, sugar and energy content. They both claim their probiotic yoghurts have health benefits. Cacao green has the additional point for being organic yoghurt. Tutti Frutti takes a different approach and offers more flavours.

Service, Flavours and Toppings:

Let’s start with the simpler review: Cacao Green. Cacao Green is straightforward. You go in, look at the price board overhead, make an order, maybe add some toppings if you feel like it, pay at the counter, wait along the streetway to decrease traffic inside, and recieve your mountain of frozen yoghurt.

The fro-yo machine/ Slick and sophisticated/ Sounds like a car ad

Cacao Green has 4 flavours: Original, Matcha (Japanese green tea), French strawberry and chocolate.
Original is tangy, and yoghurt-y. I’m not even sure whether it has an additional flavour to it. It’s tastes zingy and fresh.
French strawberry is a gentle strawberry flavour, it’s not artificial-tasting as I had expected it to be, or tasting of ‘french strawberry yoplait’ flavour. Strawberry is pleasant, but not the greatest strawberry flavour I have ever encountered.

Left: Original/ Blueberry compote, cheesecake/Right: Plain strawberry

Matcha is a fragrant delicate flavour that seems to be popular with the asian youth. Sometimes matcha-flavoured things are overly sweet or are poor imitations of green tea flavour. But at Cacao Green, matcha-flavoured froyo still retains its delicate notes. Some may find it too delicate, especially as the fro-yo is cold and numbs your sense of taste, but it does offer an unobtrusive background note.

Japanese matcha/ The haiku is Japanese/ A recurrent theme

I have not yet tried chocolate fro-yo.
Toppings include: chopped fruit, mochi, chocolate, cheesecake chunks, nuts and berry compotes

Chocolate or diced nuts?/ Diced fruits for your fruity fix./How about mochi?

CG Flavours: 9/10. I would love the strawberry flavour to be reformulated to be a sharper tangier flavour, but that is my preference for strawberry-things. It’s still tasty!
CG Toppings: 9/10. The cheesecake is disappointing. Just pop down to the supermarket and purchase a cheesecake there.  But there is always the added bonus of convenience.

Now to Tutti Frutti. The reason why I deem Tutti Frutti (now refered to as ‘TF’) to be more complex is because there is a lot to be reviewed here.
TF is a self-service franchise. You pick a paper tub to collect your fro-yo, have a field day on the 6 flavours available to you, go wild on all the toppings, weigh and pay. The best thing about TF, apart from the self-serve and freedom to have whatever you want in whatever quantity, is the way it appeals to consumerist psychology. It suggests you should have a certain sized portion, and subtly hints that you should have more of everything. So really, it’s the worst thing about TF if you’re bean-counting. The way it does this is a marvel and a half. Allow me to expand on this observation:
1. Larger tubs are at eye-level, hence more likely to be taken. Larger Tubs leads to Larger Serves.
There are two sizes of tubs at TF: Large and small. Large is green, and small is orange. The green tubs are placed on the top dispensing rack, as well as the middle one. These two racks are at eye-level, and are more likely to be taken than the smaller tub, orange, which is waaay down at the bottom. Also, everybody else has fallen for this and has  green tub, so you too feel compelled to take a green tub.
So what if I take a larger tub? I can control my portions. I don’t doubt your sensibilities in portion size, my friend, but portion size is a large factor in determining how much you eat. The same idea transfers over to Bigger Trolley: Buy More Things, or in this case, Bigger Tub: Dispense more Froyo.

(In effect, portions are relative. We have no natural grasp on absolute numbers, or absolute portion size. But we are very good at determining relative numbers. (This explains why we find it much easier to decide which suitcase out of a 30kg and 35kg suitcase is heavier, but still haven’t a clue whether the suitcase will pass weight limitations at the airport.) There is also a famous psychology experiment conducted with popcorn to illustrate the point that Larger Portions=Larger amount consumed. Four groups of people were invited to a movie. One group was given a small bag of fresh popcorn, one a large bag of fresh popcorn, one a small bag of stale popcorn, and the last group, a large bag of stale popcorn. In short, when you’re given a huge portion of something, be it a bag of fresh popcorn, or a bag of stale popcorn, or a giant trolley, or paper tub, you will feel compelled to consume more of it. Regardless of whether it tastes good or not.
If you made it here, thanks for reading my rant about experiments. Another experiment which involved popcorn is the ‘Bad Popcorn in Big Buckets: Portion size can influence intake as much as taste” article.  (I used my university’s subscription to access full-text. I realise that I now read journal articles for work and leisure. Neeeerd.) Actually, that might be the article I spoke of before. The additional point I wanted to make was that people who habitually eat at movie theatres, will eat more popcorn when they are given popcorn. It’s a habit, it’s hard to kick, even when the popcorn has been stale for a week. The real kicker is, the habit kicks in only when they are watching movies in a dark room, similar to the environment in movie theatres. It doesn’t kick in when the room is brightly lit. I hope you found this as interesting as I did.)

2. There are 6 flavours to choose from, instead of 1.
Given more choice, it is much easier to deliver a larger serve to yourself. In another study, 2 groups of people were told to eat as many M&Ms (except they weren’t told they were M&Ms otherwise it would seem to be a product placement) as they felt would satiate them for the time being. The group with the bowl of M&Ms in one colour ate fewer candies than the group whose bowl contained different coloured M&Ms. Colours produce the illusion of choice, even though they all taste the same.
Also, the handles for the machine are not made for precision. I tried to dispense a small smount of each, but the machine handles are heavy and insensitive, so I did end up with 230g. (Which is small compared to everybody else’s self-administered serve)

So many colours/ So, can you taste the rainbow?/They are not Skittles.

3. Freedom to pick any/all toppings
Some toppings don’t weigh very much, such as almond flakes, but some can weigh a lot, such as chocolate-and-chocolate-biscuit sticks. But most of them don’t weigh much. I enjoy the freedom to mix everything together for the ultimate knobbly fro-yo concoction.

Go on, I dare you/ Curiousity calls you/ Take all the toppings!

The flavours which I’ve tried are
Vanilla: Tastes like vanilla shots you get when you order syrup with coffee drinks. Or cheap vanilla essence.
Chocolate:Tastes like concentrated ovaltine without the malt, or like nesquik. It’s a dark brown, which is a colour I associate with dark chocolatey flavours, but alas it’s just a concentrated shot of nesquik.
Green tea: A stronger green tea flavour than most. More like the hard candy green tea flavouring than the delicate green tea in biscuits and milk candy. If you like that concentrated matcha flavour, you might like this one.
Taro: I haven’t ever liked taro-flavoured anything, and I won’t be making an exception here. It tastes like the burnt bits scrapped off toast.
Blueberry: This was my favourite out of the 5. Tastes like blueberry yoghurt flavouring.
Original was out of service, and needed to be topped up.

Fro-yo melts quickly/ Watery puddle of yog/ Looked better frozen

As an overview, I prefer the flavours at Cacao Green to TF. I also prefer the frozen yoghurt consistancy of Cacao Green to TF, it doesn’t become watery. I like both places’ toppings. I would go to CG for their frozen yoghurt and the entire experience, but to TF for the novelty and for the multitude of toppings. Eat TF for the toppings. You have my permission to forgo most of the fro-yo at TF and have a (dis)proportionate amount of topping with it.