From the Ice Cream Factory to Yo-Chi: why we still want to play with our food

Yo-Chi has arrived in London, opening its first UK frozen yoghurt bar in Notting Hill to the sort of queues most brands would be very happy to generate.

There’s plenty about the Australian brand that feels very 2026. The Notting Hill space is big, bright and highly social, complete with a DJ booth and a strawberry disco ball, creating somewhere to meet and hang out as much as somewhere to buy frozen yoghurt. It feels particularly well suited to a younger generation whose social lives don’t necessarily revolve around pubs and alcohol.

But watching people make their way around the self-service stations, choosing yoghurt flavours and adding whatever combination of toppings takes their fancy, something about it felt strangely familiar to us at The Value Engineers.

Many years ago, TVE was behind the thinking that led to Pizza Hut’s Ice Cream Factory.

Different generation, same underlying motivation?

Anyone who grew up with Pizza Hut in the 80s and 90s probably remembers the Ice Cream Factory, where the appeal wasn’t simply getting ice cream at the end of your meal, but having the freedom to make it yourself.

Choosing the flavours, pulling the handles, adding the sauces and piling on as many toppings as you thought you could get away with turned dessert into an experience. The slightly ridiculous creation you brought back to the table was yours, and making it was at least half the fun.

There are obvious parallels with Yo-Chi’s self-service model, although the cultural context surrounding it is completely different. Yo-Chi has taken the principles of choice, customisation and participation and translated them for a new generation, moving from the family restaurant theatre many of us remember to an experience built around socialising, sharing and self-expression.

The mechanics might feel familiar, but their role in people’s lives has evolved considerably.

The best innovation doesn’t always start with something new

Innovation teams are understandably under pressure to find what’s next, whether that means identifying new needs and occasions or developing new products, technologies and formats. Yet some of the richest opportunities can come from looking again at motivations that aren’t new at all and considering how they might be expressed differently today.

People enjoy having agency over an experience, making choices, expressing their tastes and putting their own stamp on things. We tend to remember experiences where we have been able to participate rather than simply receive a finished product, which was part of what made the Ice Cream Factory so distinctive decades ago and remains just as powerful today.

What has changed is the context around those motivations.

Personalisation now exists in a culture where people are accustomed to curating almost everything, from playlists and social feeds to trainers, coffee orders and skincare routines. Creating your own combination at Yo-Chi fits naturally within that world, while the process of choosing and creating also gives people more ownership over the experience and something they may want to share afterwards.

For brands, understanding that distinction between an enduring consumer motivation and its contemporary expression can open up much more interesting areas for innovation.

What category is Yo-Chi actually competing in?

There’s another reason we think Yo-Chi is interesting. If the ambition had simply been to create a better frozen yoghurt shop, the focus could have remained on flavours, ingredients, formats and price, but the experience built around the product allows the brand to play a much broader role.

The Notting Hill site has room for more than 100 people, alongside music, communal seating and an atmosphere designed to encourage people to stay. That starts to shift the competitive set beyond frozen yoghurt and ice cream towards cafés, coffee shops, bars and the other places people choose when they want to meet friends and spend time together.

This feels particularly relevant as younger consumers reconsider the role alcohol plays in their social lives. The desire to meet, linger and have fun hasn’t disappeared, creating space for brands that can offer compelling alternatives and giving physical spaces the opportunity to become a meaningful part of the proposition rather than simply somewhere the transaction happens.

Looking backwards can help brands move forwards

The connection between Pizza Hut’s Ice Cream Factory and Yo-Chi isn’t really a story about frozen desserts. For us, it’s an interesting reminder that understanding people deeply means being able to separate an enduring human motivation from the way it happens to manifest itself at a particular moment in time.

The desire for choice, agency, creativity, participation and sociability doesn’t belong to one particular generation. What changes is the cultural context around those motivations and, as a result, the way brands need to bring them to life.

There will always be opportunities that come from spotting genuinely new needs and behaviours, but there can be just as much potential in revisiting something people have always enjoyed and asking what it could mean today.

Nearly four decades after TVE helped create the thinking behind the Ice Cream Factory, seeing the crowds around Yo-Chi suggests there’s still plenty of appetite for playing with your food.