how tom works | Tom Arthur

Frozen yogurt. It seems easy enough. First off, what would you think “natural frozen yogurt” means? One might say that ‘natural’ means free from artificial flavors, colors and preservatives. Well, Cherry On Top believes that natural actually means “mostly all natural ingredients.”

Every single one of their products has artificial flavor in the ingredient list. Click here to see this PDF of their nutrition facts. In July, I went to the website and submitted a comment about how calling an artificial product natural is misleading. The agent from the company apologized and told me that the Orange store was one of the first stores and that is why it still has items with their old catchphrase “Natural Frozen Yogurt.”  It is now September and as you can see, the cups still say “natural.” What is worse, they have now switched the name placards in front of the machines so they do not contain the ingredient list any longer (yes, they used to list nutrition and ingredient facts on the placards). Now, if you want to know about the artificial flavor in their yogurt, you’ll have to ask for an ingredient list. Tricky.

But I degrees, the real issue is the displays they have behind the payment area. Last night I ended up going to buy some unnatural frozen yogurt to cleanse my palate of the Haven Gastropub (nice theming, meh food) and noticed that they were not working correctly.

It appears that the displays are actually running from one Windows XP computer that displays flash animation in Internet Explorer windows. Why could I tell this? Take a look:

Oops. This does explain why the animation is jerky and jagged. Annoyingly, the content of the display changes in such a way that the price per ounce of ice cream isn’t constantly displayed. It would be better for Cherry On Top to create content that is synced with all three displays, ensuring that important information (such as the price) is constantly available. Flash and Internet Explorer do not appear to be providing a seamless experience either.

As the displays are currently setup, they function only as a novelty.

Each of the three displays is an off-the-shelf Samsung LCD television. The bezel on this model is not uniformly sized and the samsung logo and model name is printed on the plastic. Cherry On Top has decided to mount the displays in a portrait format which makes the logo seem even more out of place. I feel like they might not be properly aligned but I need to take a picture with a real camera to check.