For fifteen years, Beth Gennette owned a garden center in northern New Mexico. She moved to Walla Walla for a number of reasons: to live closer to her sister, explore the wine community and to start up a restaurant business.

“I spend a few months just thinking and looking, and seeing, well, what this community could really use,” said Gennette. “I was over in Bellevue, and I went to Red Mango, and we had the original tart . . . and I said ‘That’s it. That’s the business I want to do.”

On October 13, Gennette opened The Peach and Pear, a frozen yogurt shop. The small shop, which is located downtown on First Street, doesn’t put on any airs. There’s a handful of tables, some spare decorations and two flavors to choose from. Peach and Pear is Gennette’s first frozen yogurt venture. Although she’s worked in the restaurant industry, the shop is still unexplored territory.

“I knew it would be do-able,” said Genette, “so I just jumped right in. We created this. I’ve been a cook in the past, too. I really love food . . . I wanted to find a product that would be easy and do-able.”

Gennette contacted a Portland-based distributor called YoCream after trying Red Mango in Bellevue. In terms of product, Gennette claims she’s uninterested in the saccharine, processed frozen yogurt: ice cream imitations that share little with actual yogurt beyond the name.

The Peach and Pear offers a different sort of frozen yogurt entirely.

“It’s like a new generation of yogurt, from the old days, from, you know, ten to twenty years ago; this is a much lighter, more flavorable yogurt,” said Gennette. “It’s not so heavily sugared that all you taste is sugary sweet. You taste flavor.”

Right now, there are only two flavors of yogurt available: chocolate and original tart. Both are made with real probiotics: the bacteria which convert milk into yogurt: rather than chemicals.  The original tart is fermented during the process, which lends a sharp edge to its taste.

“There seems to be two types of people; either they’re attracted to the tart, which I was attracted to, and then other people are more attracted to the chocolate,” said Gennette. “They just have different taste buds, so it just depends on the person.”

The tangy edge present in the tart goes well with fresh fruit: either sliced or in one of the homemade sauces which Gennette serves. The chocolate can be mixed with the house coffee, which is steeped overnight in a cold press to reduce the acidic, bitter taste. While Gennette plans to expand to more machines and flavors, for now she’s satisfied with two.

One of the highlights of The Peach and Pear, however, are the homemade sauces. Customers can order blackberry, peach mango, strawberry or pomegranate. In the future, Gennette plans to experiment with Merlot to create wine. There’s a host of twenty toppings, as well: things that can be sprinkled, poured, dribbled and plopped onto the yogurt to give it extra zest.

Within the space of a month, the yogurt shop has built up a small following. Gennette has extended the weekend hours because of demand. Between residents of the town and population of sweet-toothed college students, Walla Walla has a viable market for frozen yogurt.

“What I kind of like about Walla Walla too is having the universities here,” said Gennette. “The younger people seem to be more in tune with this. This is a little fresher and they seem to really like that.”

The Peach and Pear is open from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. during the week and 11 a.m.-7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.