Yogurt: History and Origins
Yogurt has no known inventor and no known date of origin. Pottery residues show that milk was being used in the Near East and southeastern Europe by the seventh millennium BC, and that dairy curds were being strained in northern Europe in the sixth millennium BC. This article sets out what the sources say about yogurt's deep roots among early farmers and herders; the Turkish word yoğurt and what it means; yogurt in the cooking of the Middle East and South Asia; the scientific era, when the Bulgarian student Stamen Grigorov studied the bacteria of Bulgarian yogurt in Geneva in 1905 and Élie Metchnikoff made soured milk the centre of a theory of aging; the commercial era, which began with a small Barcelona yogurt maker founded in 1919; and yogurt's arrival in the United States, where a 2021 federal rule revised its legal standard of identity. Firm findings, commonly repeated estimates and untested hypotheses are labelled as such.
Table of Contents
- Ancient Roots: Milk, Herders and Early Dairying
- What "Yogurt" Means: A Turkish Word
- A Food of Many Cuisines
- The Science Begins: Grigorov, 1905
- Metchnikoff and the Longevity Hypothesis
- Commercialization: Barcelona, 1919
- Yogurt Comes to America
- Cultural and Traditional Significance
- Key Research Papers
- Connections
- Featured Videos
Ancient Roots: Milk, Herders and Early Dairying
A 2015 history review describes yogurt as part of the human diet for several millennia (Fisberg 2015). A widely repeated summary holds that yogurt was probably first made by Neolithic people in Central Asia and Mesopotamia around 5000 BC, when the first milk-producing animals were domesticated, and that the fermentation was probably discovered by accident, independently, in many different places. That date is an estimate repeated in general sources, not a dated archaeological find: yogurt itself is a soft, perishable food that leaves little direct trace.
What archaeology can measure is milk. Organic residues preserved in ancient pottery can be identified as milk fat from the carbon-isotope values of its major fatty acids. A 2008 study applied this method to more than 2,200 pottery vessels from sites in the Near East and southeastern Europe dating from the fifth to the seventh millennia BC. It found that milk was in use by the seventh millennium BC — at that time the earliest direct evidence of milk use — and that milking was particularly important in northwestern Anatolia, where conditions favoured cattle (Evershed 2008). The same study noted that cattle, sheep and goats had already been domesticated in the Near East by the eighth millennium BC.
Processing came early too. A 2013 study tested sixth-millennium-BC pottery sieves from early Neolithic sites in temperate Europe and found abundant milk fat in them, evidence that the vessels were used to separate fat-rich milk curds from the lactose-containing whey. The authors described this as the earliest evidence for cheese making in northern Europe and pointed to the manufacture of reduced-lactose milk products among lactose-intolerant prehistoric farming communities (Salque 2013). These studies show milk use and curd making, not yogurt as such; they establish that soured and processed milk foods have a very long history, which is the setting in which yogurt arose.
What "Yogurt" Means: A Turkish Word
The word comes from Turkish. A 2015 history review states that "yogurt" is believed to come from the Turkish word yoğurmak, which means to thicken, coagulate or curdle (Fisberg 2015); general reference sources give the Ottoman Turkish forms yugurt and yoğurt, relating them to roots meaning "to condense" and "to knead."
The word is old in writing. Two eleventh-century Turkic works, the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk of Mahmud al-Kashgari and the Kutadgu Bilig of Yusuf Has Hajib, are reported to mention the word "yogurt" in different sections and to describe its use by nomadic Turks.
From Turkish the word passed into other languages. General reference sources date its first use in English to 1625, and the spelling has never fully settled: yogurt, yoghurt, yogourt and yoghourt are all in use.
A Food of Many Cuisines
Long before any laboratory looked at it, yogurt was part of everyday cooking across a broad sweep of the world. In Middle Eastern cuisine, yogurt mixed with water and sometimes salt makes drinks such as ayran and doogh; yogurt strained to remove the whey is known as labneh in Middle Eastern countries; and dovga is a yogurt soup cooked with herbs and rice and served warm in winter. The Greek physician Galen (AD 129–c. 216) mentioned a yogurt-like product called oxygala eaten with honey.
In South Asia, yogurt is known as dahi, a yogurt of the Indian subcontinent with its own characteristic taste and consistency, and lassi, a drink of stirred, liquefied yogurt, is either salted or sweetened with sugar.
The Turkish-derived name is one thread of yogurt's history; the food belonged to many peoples, each with its own version, vocabulary and customs, which fits the view that it arose independently in many places.
The Science Begins: Grigorov, 1905
For thousands of years people made yogurt without knowing what turned the milk. The central figure in changing that is the Bulgarian Stamen Grigorov (1878–1945; in French, Grigoroff). In 1905, aged 27 and a medical student, he worked in the microbiology laboratory of Professor Léon Massol in Geneva, examined the microflora of Bulgarian yogurt, and identified a bacillus as the basis of the fermentation; Metchnikoff cites the work to the Revue médicale de la Suisse romande of 1905. A 2015 history review describes him as the Bulgarian medical student who attributed yogurt's benefits to lactic acid bacteria (Fisberg 2015).
Metchnikoff's own account, in The Prolongation of Life, gives the sequence as he saw it: through Massol he obtained a specimen of Bulgarian "yahourth"; Massol, working with his pupil Grigoroff, isolated several microbes from it, among them "a very active lactic bacillus"; and the same soured milk, studied in Metchnikoff's laboratory in Paris, yielded "a very powerful lactic ferment, which has been named the Bulgarian bacillus" (Metchnikoff 1908). Under modern bacterial taxonomy the yogurt organism is Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus. It remains, with Streptococcus thermophilus, one of the two bacteria that the US standard of identity requires in yogurt's characterizing culture (21 CFR 131.200). Grigorov is also credited with work on a tuberculosis treatment with Albert Calmette in 1906.
Grigorov did not invent yogurt. What he and Massol did was identify a specific living agent behind the fermentation, which made a folk practice something that could be studied and reproduced.
Metchnikoff and the Longevity Hypothesis
Élie Metchnikoff (1845–1916; also written Ilya Mechnikov), born near Kharkov in the Russian Empire and later sub-director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, shared the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Ehrlich in recognition of their work on immunity. His book on aging appeared in French in 1907 as Essais optimistes; the English translation, The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies, edited by P. Chalmers Mitchell, was published in London in 1907 and in New York in 1908.
In it Metchnikoff argued, as a 2013 review summarizes it, that virtually all of the disabilities of old age are the work of phagocytes turned from defenders against infection into destroyers of healthy tissue by autotoxins from putrefactive bacteria, and he proposed daily doses of soured milk (yogurt) to change the intestinal flora (Mackowiak 2013). The book links this to Bulgaria directly: "M. Grigoroff, a Bulgarian student at Geneva, has been surprised by the number of centenarians to be found in Bulgaria, a region in which yahourth, a soured milk, is the staple food" (Metchnikoff 1908). Elsewhere in the book he quoted another author's figure of more than 5,000 centenarians in Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, together with that author's own caveat that "these figures appear to be exaggerated."
The longevity idea was a hypothesis. A 2013 review states that the efficacy of his treatment in retarding the onset of senility was never validated scientifically, and that later investigators showed that L. bulgaricus is unable to survive in the human intestine. The same review describes the theory as having flourished for a time, then drifted to the fringe of medical practice before re-emerging in the mid-1990s as a concept worthy of mainstream medical attention (Mackowiak 2013). The present-day evidence on yogurt and the gut is covered in the Yogurt Benefits articles and on the main Yogurt page.
Commercialization: Barcelona, 1919
Isaac Carasso (1874–1939) was a member of a Sephardic Jewish family of Ottoman Salonica (modern Thessaloniki), a region where yogurt was widely eaten. In 1916 he moved his family to Barcelona, Spain. Accounts of his life say that he saw children with digestive problems, recalled that such conditions were treated with yogurt in the Balkans, and was inspired by Metchnikoff's promotion of soured milk; they differ on whether his cultures came from Bulgaria or from Metchnikoff's laboratory at the Pasteur Institute.
In 1919 he opened a small yogurt business in Barcelona, at first selling the yogurt as a medicine through pharmacies. The small Barcelona maker of 1919 later grew into an international food group with operations in France and the United States.
His son, Daniel Carasso (1905–2009), carried the business abroad. After fleeing France when it was invaded by Germany in the Second World War, he settled in the United States, and in 1942 in the Bronx, New York, with two family friends, he bought a small yogurt company and began making yogurt there. What the family business joined together were three things that had been separate: an old food, the new science of identified cultures, and industrial production.
Yogurt Comes to America
Yogurt reached the United States through immigrant communities that had eaten it for generations. In 1929, the Armenian immigrants Sarkis and Rose Colombosian started a creamery in Andover, Massachusetts. Their yogurt was reportedly first delivered around New England in a horse-drawn wagon bearing the Armenian word "madzoon", and later sold as "yogurt", a term more familiar to many of their customers. The New York business begun in 1942 by Daniel Carasso, described above, was the second.
Adding fruit helped bring yogurt to a wider American market, though accounts differ on who did it first: one credits the New York maker with adding jam in 1947 as a concession to American tastes, another credits the Massachusetts maker with sweetening its yogurt and adding fruit preserves in 1966 to create the "fruit on the bottom" style.
In the United States, "yogurt" is also a legal term. In a final rule published on 11 June 2021 (86 FR 31117) and effective 12 July 2021, the Food and Drug Administration revoked the separate standards of identity for lowfat yogurt and nonfat yogurt and amended the standard for yogurt, describing the rule as modernizing the standard to allow for technological advances while preserving the basic nature and essential characteristics of yogurt; it responded in part to a citizen petition from a yogurt trade association. The current standard, at 21 CFR 131.200, defines yogurt as the food produced by culturing the specified dairy ingredients with a characterizing bacterial culture containing Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, the dairy ingredients being pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized before the culture is added. The label rules it sets are summarized on the main Yogurt page.
Cultural and Traditional Significance
In its many homelands yogurt was a practical technology: a way of keeping milk, a perishable resource, as a food that kept longer, and, as the prehistoric strainer study suggests for curd products, a way of making milk easier to digest for people who tolerated lactose poorly (Salque 2013). It is also an everyday food across many cuisines, from the yogurt drinks of the Middle East to the dahi and lassi of South Asia.
Yogurt has also carried a long reputation as a health food. A traditional reputation is a reason to study a food, not proof of a particular medical effect, and Metchnikoff's longevity claim was never validated (Mackowiak 2013). The evidence from controlled research on the gut microbiome, lactose digestion and other outcomes is set out in the Yogurt Benefits articles and on the main Yogurt page.
The history the sources support is a story about many people rather than a single inventor: early farmers and herders who used and processed milk; a Turkish word for thickening it; a Bulgarian student and his Geneva professor who identified a microbe at work; a Nobel laureate who made soured milk the centre of a theory of aging; and immigrant families who carried an old food into industrial production.
Key Research Papers
The list below combines peer-reviewed papers, the primary historical text, US regulatory documents and topic-search links. Where a claim in this article is a hypothesis (Metchnikoff's longevity argument) or a commonly repeated estimate rather than a dated find (the "5000 BC" origin), it is labelled as such in the text. Author names, titles and journals are given as plain text; only the stable DOI, PMID or archive link is hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.
- Fisberg M, Machado R. History of yogurt and current patterns of consumption. Nutrition Reviews. 2015;73(Suppl 1):4-7. — doi:10.1093/nutrit/nuv020 · PubMed PMID: 26175483
- Weerathilake WADV, Rasika DMD, Ruwanmali JKU, Munasinghe MADD. The evolution, processing, varieties and health benefits of yogurt. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications. 2014;4(4). — ijsrp.org (2014)
- Mackowiak PA. Recycling Metchnikoff: probiotics, the intestinal microbiome and the quest for long life. Frontiers in Public Health. 2013;1:52. — doi:10.3389/fpubh.2013.00052 · PubMed PMID: 24350221
- Anukam KC, Reid G. Probiotics: 100 years (1907-2007) after Elie Metchnikoff's observation. In: Communicating Current Research and Educational Topics and Trends in Applied Microbiology. 2007;1:466-474. — PubMed: Metchnikoff probiotics history
- Gómez-Gallego C, Gueimonde M, Salminen S. The role of yogurt in food-based dietary guidelines. Nutrition Reviews. 2018;76(Suppl 1):29-39. — doi:10.1093/nutrit/nuy059 · PubMed PMID: 30452698
- Yogurt history, etymology, and origins — PubMed: yogurt history and origin of fermented milk
- Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus in yogurt fermentation — PubMed: Lactobacillus bulgaricus and yogurt fermentation
- Dahi (Indian yogurt) microbiology and traditional fermentation — PubMed: dahi traditional fermented milk of India
- Yogurt. In: Encyclopaedia Britannica (origin, etymology, and history). — britannica.com/topic/yogurt
- Evershed RP, Payne S, Sherratt AG, et al. Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding. Nature. 2008;455(7212):528-531. — doi:10.1038/nature07180 · PubMed PMID: 18690215
- Salque M, Bogucki PI, Pyzel J, Sobkowiak-Tabaka I, Grygiel R, Szmyt M, Evershed RP. Earliest evidence for cheese making in the sixth millennium BC in northern Europe. Nature. 2013;493(7433):522-525. — doi:10.1038/nature11698 · PubMed PMID: 23235824
- Metchnikoff E. The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies. English translation edited by P. Chalmers Mitchell. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons; 1908 (London edition 1907; French original Essais optimistes, 1907). — archive.org (1908 edition)
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Milk and Cream Products and Yogurt Products; Final Rule To Revoke the Standards for Lowfat Yogurt and Nonfat Yogurt and To Amend the Standard for Yogurt. Federal Register. 2021;86:31117-31138 (June 11, 2021). — Federal Register 2021-12220
- 21 CFR 131.200 — Yogurt (standard of identity; 86 FR 31137, June 11, 2021, as amended). — eCFR: 21 CFR 131.200
Editorial note (2026-10-14): entry 5 was previously listed as "Gueimonde M, Salminen S, 2015;73(Suppl 1):8-14" and linked to PMID 26175484, which is a different paper (Moreno LA et al., dairy products, yogurt consumption and cardiometabolic risk in children and adolescents); the entry now gives the paper of that title as indexed in PubMed (Gómez-Gallego, Gueimonde and Salminen, 2018). The link for entry 2 pointed to an empty record and now points to the paper. The commercial and etymological history in this article was checked against general reference sources listed below; Britannica could not be retrieved for this check.