A Dallas tasting, an exclamation and a shop name.

TCBY began as a single frozen yogurt shop in Little Rock, Arkansas, opened in 1981 by Frank Hickingbotham. The CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, in an entry last updated in March 2024, describes him as an Arkansas native who had been a junior high school principal, an insurance salesman and the owner of several other food businesses, which he sold before starting the yogurt shop.

The name came from a tasting. The encyclopedia says Hickingbotham had tried frozen yogurt a few years earlier at a Neiman Marcus store in Dallas, Texas, and, as the story is told, exclaimed “This can’t be yogurt!” He used the phrase as the name of his first shop, which sold frozen yogurt made by the same company that supplied the Dallas department store. English Wikipedia gives the same original name, This Can’t Be Yogurt, for the business before 1984.

The shop multiplied quickly within the state. The encyclopedia records a second store in North Little Rock and a third in Conway, with Hickingbotham drawing on family members to manage the growing business; his sons, Herren and Todd, managed the first and third stores. He later explained, in words the encyclopedia quotes, that the first shop had been “something to do, something to play with,” before he expected to spend his days playing golf. Franchising began in 1982, and the encyclopedia says Hickingbotham served as chairman and chief executive throughout the company’s independent life.

The name then had to change. According to the encyclopedia, a Texas company with a similar name sued in 1984; Wikipedia identifies that company as I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt!. The business kept its four initials and attached a new phrase to them, and the encyclopedia says the name was eventually shortened to the letters alone, TCBY.

A tower downtown, then new owners in Utah, Colorado and New York.

For almost twenty years the company was run from downtown Little Rock. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the Capitol Tower, a high-rise in the city centre, was known as the TCBY Tower from 1991 to 2004 and carried the four letters on its upper floors. Wikipedia dates the company’s move into the building to 1991 and says TCBY vacated it in 2000; Wikipedia now names the building as the Simmons Tower.

Through the 1990s the brand appeared beyond its own shops. Wikipedia says TCBY began co-branding with Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Subway and Burger King in 1995. It also notes that TCBY traded for several years in Honduras, Costa Rica and Nicaragua before closing its branches there.

The sale came in 2000. The encyclopedia says Capricorn Management Inc., the parent of Mrs. Fields, Great American Cookies, Pretzel Time and Pretzelmaker, acquired the company that year and moved its offices to Salt Lake City, Utah, citing reports in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette of February and June 2000. Wikipedia describes the combined business as Mrs. Fields Famous Brands and says it moved its headquarters to Broomfield, Colorado, in 2012.

Today TCBY is grouped with the cookie brand under Famous Brands International, which describes itself on its website as the international franchising business for Mrs. Fields and TCBY. TCBY’s own “About” page describes the brand as based in New York, while still tracing its first shop to Little Rock in 1981.

Design and documentation.

A mall treat shop has to be read from a distance and in a hurry. Many of its customers are walking past, often with somewhere else to be, so the name above the counter, the colour of the canopy and the shape of the sign do most of the work before anyone reaches the menu board. In a food court or on a concourse, a kiosk may stand only a few steps from a rival, which puts weight on a short name, a strong colour and a sign that can be seen from the escalator.

Up close, the identity moves onto smaller things: the cup, the cone sleeve, the spoon, the napkin, the take-home tub and the paper bag. These are the pieces that leave the shop, and they often carry the brand further than the storefront does. The counter itself, with its freezer cases, mixing stations or display glass, is part of the show.

Each guide in this group looks at who started the name, who owns it now, and how its signs, cups, characters and packaging have been described in dated sources, and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

Four letters that outlived two phrases.

The TCBY identity rests on four initials. They began as an abbreviation of an exclamation, were attached to a second phrase after the 1984 lawsuit, and now stand on their own. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas records the same letters on the upper floors of the downtown tower that carried the company’s name from 1991. The initials have also been read back into new phrases: Wikipedia says a 2009 contest that offered one entrant a franchise of their own was called “This Could Be Yours: The Great TCBY Store Giveaway.”

The shop format has changed more than the name. Wikipedia says the chain traditionally served both hard-scooped and soft-serve yogurt, and that in 2010 it opened a prototype store in Salt Lake City run on a different model, in which customers serve themselves from the yogurt machines, add their own fruit or candy toppings and pay by weight. The winners of the 2009 contest opened their shop in Rogers, Arkansas, in April 2011 using that self-serve prototype and a new store design, Wikipedia says. The company’s franchise site now lists self-serve shops, counter-service stores and a compact kiosk among its formats, and names strip shopping centres, drive-thrus and shopping malls among the places they can go.

Wikipedia also records the launch of Super Fro-Yo, a reformulated yogurt, in May 2011, and of a Greek-style frozen yogurt in January 2012, alongside smoothies sold as Berriyo. It says the soft-serve line is built around Golden Vanilla, Chocolate and White Chocolate Mousse with rotating flavours, and that in September 2010 the company tested a non-frozen yogurt line called Yovana in self-service company stores in Salt Lake City, then its headquarters.

For a design guide, TCBY shows how a set of initials can carry a brand through a forced change of name, a move out of its home state and a run of new owners. Compare it with Carvel, another treat chain that moved from a single shop into franchising, and Baskin-Robbins, another franchised frozen-dessert chain. For this guide we use swirl blue, berry pink and yogurt white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep TCBY’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.