Life in Thailand has many advantages for Western expatriates, but the choice of dairy products is not one of them. Good cheese is expensive and difficult to find unless you are living in one of the major tourist centres. Some brands of cows milk taste “weird” to the Western palette and the sweetened and flavoured versions taste awful unless you are five years old. Nevertheless, I have tried some decent goats milk that presumably comes from some of the smaller and possibly Western-influenced producers and was very much impressed.

Small pots of mass produced yoghurt made with cows milk are available throughout the country in most stores including 7 Eleven and Family Mart. Natural and live yoghurt is difficult to find and the closest you’ll get is plain or unflavoured yoghurt.

Dutch Mill or Dutchie (ดัชชี่) produce a yoghurt labelled 0% Fat Free Lower Sugar. The plain yoghurt (plain packaging, no pictures of fruit or vegetables) looks like it should be plain, unsweetened yoghurt but the ingredients are in Thai. Disappointingly, on first taste it is clearly sweetened, although not unbearably so.

Reading the Thai label, I learn this yoghurt contains 9g of sugar in one small pot (140g) but it’s not clear whether that is from natural or added sugars. The ingredients include 92.64% yoghurt (made from skimmed milk and milk powder) and a new word I had never encountered before: ฟรุคโตโอลิโกแซคคาไรด์ (3.5%). I’m no chemist nor dietician, but I believe this may be Fructooligosaccharide which is used as an alternative sweetener. The remaining 3.86% is unaccounted for.

If I had to give this yoghurt a rating, I might give it 2 or 3 stars out of 5. It has a good, creamy smooth texture, but is let down by the sweetener. Full fat milk and no added sweeteners would be much more to my taste.