When Matt brought home a couple of Wallaby yogurts last week, I had two questions: what exactly is Australian style yogurt, and why is a company in Napa County, California, producing it?

After tasting it, I had a third question: what took us so long to discover this wonderful yogurt? Wallaby's been making small batches of lowfat organic yogurt for more than a decade. Their yogurts have a subtle sweetness and delicate flavor unlike any yogurt I've ever had. Wallaby's smooth, creamy texture comes from being slow cooked instead of thickened with gelatins or starches.

Jerry and Faith Chou, Wallaby's founders, were so enthralled with Australia's creamy, not-too-sweet style of yogurt on a visit there in 1992 that they quit their tech jobs upon returning to California and founded Wallaby.

It took several years of research to perfect the process that gives us this sublime yogurt, which requires an incubation time of 8 to 9 hours, double the industry norm. "While a typical yogurt plant can make 3-5 batches of yogurt a day, we can make only 1 batch in a 24 hour period," Jerry Chou told SavorCalifornia, a website devoted to California's specialty foods.

"We have a 2-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter," Chou added. "We make only organic products because we are committed to creating products that we would gladly feed to our kids."

Wallaby met with so much success in the San Francisco area where the Chous first marketed it that in 1999 they moved to a brand-new, custom built facility. Jerry Chou believes that Wallaby's "success can be directly attributed to the uniqueness of our product and the quality of our people."

The Chous took environmental concerns into account when deciding on Wallaby's packaging. "We chose #5 plastic because this allows us to use a much lighter cup and reduce the amount of plastics ever being used in the first place...if you can't recycle #5 plastic where you live," Wallaby's website notes, "mail the clean and empty cups back to us and we will take them to our local recycler who will accept #5 plastic."

But let's not lose sight of what really makes Wallaby so great; the flavor! No doubt there are plenty of full fat yogurts on the shelves that probably taste great, too, but I try to steer clear of full fat dairy, so I don't even bother to try them.

Matt, however, lives in a state of Perpetual Pursuit of Something Better, so when he spotted Wallaby, he figured it might be an improvement over the nonfat Stonyfield Farms yogurts we buy.

Wallaby offers several flavors of nonfat yogurt, too, but Matt wanted to try their low fat varieties, which contain a mere 2.5 grams of fat. After tasting them, I totally agree, the low fat beats the no-fat. I especially like the blueberry and maple flavors, but they're all excellent. And the nonfat varieties are good, too; I just think you might as well splurge.

Wallaby's mission, according to their website, is nothing less than "to produce the best-tasting yogurt in the United States." They may well have succeeded; when I went to Whole Foods to buy more yesterday, there was hardly any left. I guess we're not the only ones who've discovered them.