Oprah Winfrey’s Sunday-night interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was full of heavy, sad revelations, but there was one moment of levity: When Markle described working at a Los Angeles frozen-yogurt shop called Humphrey Yogart as a teen. Twitter quickly erupted in delight that such a place, with such a straight out of The Good Place name, really existed, and that a future-ex-duchess could have worked there. While we couldn’t fly to the one remaining Humphrey Yogart location in Sherman Oaks just to sample a frozen dessert with a tenuous connection to Meghan Markle, we were able to talk to Greg Rogers, the frozen-yogurt shop’s publicist and a former employee himself, who answered every question we had about this mythical place.
Have you seen a boost in business since the Meghan interview?
Oh, definitely. Since Monday morning, when there were people waiting for us to open.
And has it been a different sort of crowd than the usual clientele?
It’s kind of been a mix. It’s been a lot of people who didn’t realize there was still a Humphrey Yogart, that were all customers from the other stores. And then there were a few lookie-loos and people just wanting to take a picture of the sign.
So there were people who had known about the existence of Humphrey Yogart, and then forgotten about it, and Meghan’s interview reminded them?
Oh yeah. Back in the ’90s, it was one of those places that was like, lines out the door. My first job in L.A. when I moved here in 1990 was at Humphrey Yogart. I was a manager at the Brentwood location at the time when Meghan was working here, but I didn’t know her. My first day on the job, they taught me how to do the yogurt thing, because you scoop the yogurt into this big cone, and then a drill bit drills the ingredients in. And they said, “You do the next customer,” and I turned around, and there was O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson.
That’s the most L.A. in the ’90s thing I’ve ever heard. And you mean to tell me Meghan Markle operated a power drill to make frozen yogurt?
You had to drill! Whatever you wanted, strawberries, bananas, whatever, you would put it into a cone underneath this giant drill, and it would drill them into the yogurt. It was a very physical job, to scoop the frozen yogurt and drill that thing down. If there were big strawberries and things like that, it wasn’t easy.
What location did Meghan Markle work at?
She worked at the Beverly Connection, on La Cienega between Beverly and Third, across the street from the Beverly Center.
Since the interview came out, has Humphrey Yogart received any weird messages or requests?
Someone wanted to know if we did pies because they wanted to send one to Piers Morgan. And I’ve had people call from the Daily Mirror and the BBC.
There have been rumors of a possible Meghan Markle flavor. Is that happening?
When [the interview] first happened, we hadn’t even seen it. We just heard about the mention. So we batted around the idea, we did a little research, and in a magazine she talked about how she makes a really good banana chocolate chip bread, and Prince Harry likes peanut butter and jelly. So if we did a flavor, it would something like a Banana Royale, with peanut butter, banana, and chocolate chips. But we didn’t make it official, because once we heard the interview, and the seriousness of what was going on, we thought it would be kind of cheesy to do that. But a lot of people have taken off with it. So people are coming in and ordering [the banana/peanut butter/chocolate combo], but we didn’t put it on the menu board. We didn’t name it after her.
Is there a statement or anything from the owners about Meghan?
It was 1994 when she worked there. They had six locations and 80 employees. She [the owner, Paula] didn’t remember any incident, or anything like that. She didn’t get in any kind of trouble. One guy asked us, “What can we find out about Meghan? What can you tell us about while she was there?” I said, “The only scoop you’re gonna get is nonfat or low-fat yogurt.”
