Make yogurt at home to save money: Making your own yogurt is a great way to cut your grocery bill.  Once you have a yogurt starter culture, all you have to buy is milk which saves 50-80% over the cost of buying ready-made yogurt.

Don't continually buy yogurt starter to make yogurt--use a reusable starter culture instead: Many yogurt making methods call for buying yogurt starter (such as Yogourmet and similar brands) which require you to purchase yogurt starter every time you make yogurt.  Other yogurt making methods suggest buying commercially available yogurt to use as a starter but again you have to continually buy small containers of yogurt to make yogurt at home.

Using a reusable yogurt starter means you only buy the yogurt starter culture once to make unlimited amounts of yogurt.  Each time you make yogurt, you simply reserve a small amount of the batch to use as a starter culture the next time you make yogurt.  There are six varities of reusable yogurt starter available.  Click here for more information.

Make yogurt at home to save on packaging waste: Yogurt containers should be recycled but still are an unnecessary packaging waste.  If you make yogurt at home, you can do so in reusable containers (such as a canning jar or old mayonniase jar).  You can even reuse your old yogurt containers from the store to divide the yogurt you make into ready-to-eat portions (1/2 pint canning jars work great for this too).

Make yogurt at home to use organic ingredients: Organic yogurt can be expensive and isn't always readily available.  Make organic yogurt at home with your organic milk and our reusable starter cultures made from only organic ingredients.  Making organic yogurt at home saves 50-80% over the cost of buying organic yogurt at the store.

Make yogurt at home to control your ingredients: When you make yogurt at home, you can control the quality of milk you use.  For example, you can make yogurt with organic or conventional milk, homogenized or non-homogenized milk, pasteurized or raw milk.  You can also make yogurt without the additives and stabilizers common in commercial varieties.  Finally, you can make yogurt without added sugar.  Flavor the yogurt you make with fruit, honey (raw honey is wonderful!), stevia, sugar-free (aka all fruit) jam, or flavor extracts such as vanilla.

Make yogurt at home to have truly raw yogurt: Did you know you can make yogurt using raw milk?  If you drink raw milk but don't want to destroy the properties of the raw milk during the yogurt making process, you can use mesophilic (low temperature) yogurt starter cultures to make yogurt on your counter--no heat required!  There are four varieties of low temperature yogurt starter cultures which culture at room temperature (72-78 degrees).