Last year, Diana Lee’s title changed from Content Designer to Yogurt Freak. Lee, who worked at DoorDash for 3 years, is now the solopreneur behind Yogurt Freak, selling gelato-like Korean strained yogurt at pop-ups across the city.
Thick yogurt, often strained thrice, is a Korean staple. When done right, it’s so thick that it’s served by an ice cream scoop and topped with jellies and syrups. Indulgent like ice cream but filled with probiotics and protein, it’s eaten morning to night in Korea and sold by chains like Yoajung.
Lee, who is based in San Mateo, is in the midst of a three-weekend Yogurt Freak pop-up series in San Francisco. Her first SF event at Morella in the Marina this past weekend was, as pop-ups here often are, “totally insane.” It featured Lee’s yogurts, as well as pastries from Hali Home Bakes, a French-Asian microbakery from Hali Mo. Lee and Mo also collaborated on a yogurt croissant mille feuille.
This Saturday’s pop-up will be held at Binge Coffee House at 530 Valencia St. in the Mission; on August 29th, she’ll be at Bagel Daddy at 685 Townsend St. in the Design District. On the menu will be three of Lee’s classics: yuzu, magnolia berry, and green plum, as well as two seasonal flavors: sugar tomato and sweet corn.
The yogurts range from $6 to $7 for a single 4-ounce serving or $20 to $26 for a 16-ounce. In addition to weekend pop-ups, Yogurt Freak does catering and pre-orders that can be picked up on weekdays.
Lee spent the first ten years of her life in Ilsan, Korea, about an hour outside of Seoul, before moving to the Bay Area. The idea for Yogurt Freak occurred to her on a trip back to Korea, during which she spent four months on Jeju Island recuperating and frequenting yogurt cafes.
Growing up in Ilsan, she lived with her grandmother who made everything at home: “All the stuff that you actually see in grocery stores today, like hot pepper paste and fermented soy bean paste, things like that, she made all that from scratch. It would ferment freshly on our balcony,” said Lee.
Her grandmother is the inspiration for many of Lee’s flavors, including the sugar tomato, which includes sweet tomato puree-infused yogurt with strawberry-watermelon-tomato drizzle. “She used to cut up tomatoes and sprinkled sugar on them as an after school snack,” said Lee. “I've heard from a lot of different customers who grew up in different parts of the world and in Asia who said that was also a snack that they had growing up, so it's really cool to have to be able to connect people through this singular food item.”
Lee’s father, a Korean traditional medicine herbalist, also inspired her creations. Magnolia berry, for example, is a rare medicinal adaptogen that doubles as a flavorful yogurt topping known for tasting sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and subtly spicy all in one bite.
Other toppings such as crunchy jujube chips, yuzu, and tart green plum (known as maesil) are common Korean dessert fixings but are hard to come by here.
“I have two criteria for picking the flavors,” said Lee. “One, I would eat this constantly even if I wasn't selling it. And two, it holds an emotional connection to my life's experience. So, like all these flavors hold some emotional connection either to my grandma or to my dad.”
Lee had virtually zero kitchen or food service experience before starting Yogurt Freak. Now, she operates her one-woman show out of a commercial kitchen in San Mateo. (She’s on the hunt for some part-time help.) She attributes much of her success to the generous advice of friends and business owners: “You know that saying, like, it takes a village to raise a child? It truly takes a village to build a business.”
Lee also says her not-so-distant past life working in tech has helped inform her business. Her previous role doing content design for DoorDash helped her learn how to bring her yogurt to customers. “That's what I'm doing for my pop-ups now. I'm doing the production and then figuring out, Okay, how do I get this to an accessible pick-up location for people? I learned a ton from that job.” (Tech workers call this delivery optimization logistics; the laymen call it a regular day.)
Lee is hardly alone making the change from tech employee to food entrepreneur. Mo of Hali’s Home Bakes, Elisa Sunga of the viral Cake Picnic, Anand Upender of York Street Collective, and Alex Pong of Paper Son Coffee, to name a few, made similar pivots. Despite having left tech due to what she described as physical and emotional burnout, Lee isn’t giving up on the hustle: She hopes to scale Yogurt Freak nationwide as storefronts and in grocery stores. After that, the world.
In the meantime, she’s preparing for her pop-ups. “I think in the end the goal is to just make sure no one leaves empty-handed,” Lee said.
