The yogurt department is getting a bit more crowded with the launch of a new brand with a quirky name.

Iögo (pronounced yo-go) hit store shelves this month with 44 skus, including traditional yogurt, drinkable yogurt, squeezable yogurt and, of course, Greek-style yogurt.

The brand was launched by Longueuil, Que.-based Ultima Foods. Its creation was the result of a recently announced brand licence swap of another yogurt brand, Yoplait.

In Canada, Ultima held brand rights to Yoplait for 40 years. But earlier this year, Yoplait S.A.S announced that it was terminating that deal and transfering the brand licence to General Mills as of Sept. 1

Even though Ultima Foods will continue to manufacture Yoplait for General Mills, the loss of the brand licence let it introduce its own yogurt brand.

“We know the yogurt business. We’ve been in there for 40 years,” Diane Jubinville, director of PR for Ultima said at a recent press conference to launch the brand.

Ultima is calling the launch of Iögo one of the largest brand launches ever by a Canadian food company. The brand encompasses seven product lines with 44 retail SKUs and 21 foodservice SKUs.

To promote the brand in-store, Ultima is doing in-store demos, giving away samples and handing out coupons. Advertising will include TV spots both for the brand and each of the seven product lines.

Those ads, which are slated to start airing in September, will feature the two “umlaut” dots of the Iögo brand prominently over people’s heads.

The idea is to emphasize that Iögo is the new way to say yogurt, company officials said. The ads will also play off the bold packaging’s black colours.

“We think this brand will reinvigorate the category,” Ultimate president Gerry Doutre said.

Not that yogurt hasn’t done well as overall anyway. It’s long been one of the fastest growing categories in grocery aisles with NPD Group dubbing it the “food of the decade.”

Consumption of yogurt per person in Canada increased 60 per cent between 2001 and 2011 The average Canadian now reaches for yogurt 61 times a year versus 25 times a year in 2001.

But there may be room for further growth and even a new brand.

Officials from Ultima note that despite Canadians’ considerable appetite for yogurt today, we eat a lot less than Europeans. The average Canadian consumes 8.7 kilograms of yogurt per year, while Great Britons consume 9.1 kilos; and the French 14.8. Americans, meanwhile, eat just 3.7 kilos.

Yogurt products, meanwhile, come and go on shelf. Seventy-seven per cent of yogurt products on the shelf in 2001 are no longer available. So consumers are always looking for something new and innovative, Ultima officials said.

Among the new lines in the Iögo brand:

• Iögo: the main line of yogurts in flavours like strawberry, lychee-raspberry and luscious lemon pie.

• Iögo 0% is a fat-free yogurt with 35 calories per 100 grams. Flavours include pineapple-coconut-banana and melon trio.

• Iögo Probio contains two probiotics in flavours like vanilla, strawberry fig-date and apple-grape. Four flavours also come in a lactose-free version.

• Iögo Greko is a Green-style yogurt sold plain or with stirred fruit,

• Iögo Nomad: a drinkable yogurt available in two sizes (2oo ml and 300 ml) with a twist-off cap for drinking on the go.

• Iögo Zip: Yogurt tubes aimed at kids with original comic strips designed by Canadian comic artists on the packaging. Perhaps the most interesting product in the Zip line is a limited edition “Fusion” product that consists of two tubes kids can eat at the same time to create a third new flavour. So, for instance, passion fruit and orange flavoured tubes created a peach flavour.

• Iögo Nano: For children, these products include fresh cheeses in cups to drinkable yogurts in mini-bottles with a spill-proof cap.

That last line is interesting perhaps as well for the way it was consumer tested. In this case, Ultima asked its employees to have their own children sample the Nano products and more than 200 kids aged three to 10 were involved in the test.

Eight-four per cent approved of the product, company officials noted.