‘Wonderfully thick, creamy and clean-tasting’: the best supermarket natural yoghurts, tasted and rated

Live natural yoghurt is the bedrock of my family’s diet. My six-year-old, for instance, gets through well over a kilo a week: for breakfast, she’ll have it with porridge, sometimes with blackstrap molasses, while most evenings she’ll have a generous bowl of yoghurt topped with frozen blueberries or mango before bed (ideally before teeth-brushing negotiations begin). To avoid excessive sugar and more processed ingredients, we never buy sweetened or flavoured yoghurt: just the plain, full-fat stuff that’s packed with beneficial bacteria.

So what is live yoghurt, and why does it matter? Live yoghurt contains active bacterial cultures, most commonly strains of Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium and Streptococcus thermophilus. These cultures help ferment the milk, which is what gives live yoghurt its tang, texture and digestibility, and they’re one of the reasons it’s linked to gut health.

Clear provenance is sadly lacking in this test group, and while most of them are made from British milk, that counts little towards transparency. When I can, I choose organic as a mark of quality and because it tells a clearer story about farming, welfare and standards.