Bernardo Braga
Bernardo (left) takes delivery of pizza from one of Yolk’s riders
A Yolk rider begins the journey from Ruya to customer
Bernardo inside a delivery van for The Felix Project charity
Meet the teenage entrepreneur whose cracking idea to keep food warm is set to revolutionise the high-end restaurant takeaway delivery market. His company Yolk is now delivering fine fayre from the likes of C London, Sumosan, Crazy Pizza, Bombay Brasserie and Benares to THE CAPITAL’S most distinguished postcodes – aND AT the perfect temperature
When we meet 17-year-old Bernardo Braga at Yolk’s office in Knightsbridge in late August, it’s less than a fortnight since his app-powered delivery business first took to the road. Coincidentally it’s on the same day that the Wake Up to Money programme on BBC Radio 5 Live reported that Britons taste for takeaways has outlasted the pandemic. This is potentially great news for Braga, who decided to launch the firm after too many takeaway orders arrived cold and soggy.
The dilemma of how to keep meals at an optimum temperature on their journey from restaurant to home provided the A-level student food for thought during lockdown. Not only was he was convinced that there was a solution so meals would arrive at diners’ homes at the correct temperature, but one that would provide a unique selling point from which he could launch a food delivery business.
“I was hearing more and more people complaining about the temperature and quality of food being delivered, not just mass-market restaurants but luxury ones too,” he says. “There’s nothing worse on a Friday night when you’re really hungry and the meal arrives cold.”
“I’ve travelled to America and Japan and no one seemed to have a solution for the temperature of the food. People have become accustomed to those standards but I wanted to elevate them. And through our marketing, our app and our technology I want to prove that food will arrive hot.”
“One of the main reasons we’re concentrating on the luxury market is because I don’t think our competitors do it well.”
While juggling the pressures of schoolwork and the Zoom classroom, Bernardo started researching ideas. He eventually found a company based in Germany which manufactures silicone heaters that are used in restaurants and in homes to keep food warm.
“I wanted to see if this could work for deliveries, so I approached them and I talked through my idea for deliveries,” he says. “They went on to develop a thin silicone heat pad for us which lies flat in the delivery compartment of a delivery motorbike and plugs directly into the vehicle’s battery. We can turn the heater from 0-100°C but we tend to keep it at around 60°C because we want to maintain the food’s temperature, not heat it up or dry it out.”
Chefs, however, can dictate the temperature according to the food being delivered and these silicone heaters give Yolk the advantage of being able to offer its service to customers within a 20-minute delivery radius – twice as long, Bernardo says, as competitors in the high-end sector.
“On a 20-minute ride from the restaurant to the client's house, the food temperature with us only falls from zero to two degrees, compared to other delivery apps – and we have tried them – that can go anywhere from 15°C to 30°C. We could go up to 25 minutes with the food still arriving hot and not dry.”
This larger radius gives Yolk a larger potential customer base for the high-end restaurants, mostly based in Mayfair, that it has partnered with.
“We tested different radiuses and work in area five miles from Berkeley Square where our riders are based. It is much wider audience than the current delivery companies. We cover the areas in London where most of our audience is at: Knightsbridge, Belgravia, Chelsea, Mayfair, Hampstead, City, Soho, Fitzrovia, Marylebone and some parts of Fulham.
“Our goal is to have one restaurant in every single cuisine, from Mexican to Japanese to American to British. And we have luckily managed to partner with many of those so far. And there are many more to come,” says Bernardo.
He spent around four months proving to restaurants that Yolk’s heat technology, iPhone and Android apps plus customer-focused riders would be a perfect fit for their brand. Already, renowned dining establishments including C London, Sumosan, Crazy Pizza, Bombay Brasserie and Benares have jumped aboard.
“Those three things have to be on point. And we saw that our competitor’s app wasn't really, so if we invested heavily on technology,” says Bernardo, explaining that there’s no point having a strong marketing campaign if the app doesn’t work.
“We’ve managed to attract many consumers but if they went to the app and it didn’t work, or the payment failed or they can’t track the rider then they’re not going to come back. Our app is very good and like any technology, it will continue to evolve.”
With high-end deliveries there’s also an expectation that the food is not only warm but presentable, so Bernardo also looked at ways of configuring food delivery bags that sit inside the motorbike’s hard cabinet to keep trays and boxes stable.
“We customised the boxes with Velcro, so if the order is large, we make it bigger, and if it’s smaller, we make it smaller to make it sit stable and solid throughout the whole journey.”
But the innovation doesn’t stop there. Customers will soon be able to track the temperature of their food on its journey from restaurant to home.
“We have partnered with a Brazilian company, which is backed by Microsoft, to install thermometers inside our [bike] boxes so clients can use the app to track the temperature of the food.”
Yolk had found its USP. But while it’s one thing to want your takeaway to arrive warm, it’s quite another to launch a business around that desire. Entrepreneurialism, however, is in Bernardo’s blood. His father’s company distributes medicine in Brazil and South America. The teenager, who moved to Britain aged 11 to attend boarding school, speaks fondly of learning about the family pharmaceutical business from a young age.
“I speak a lot with my father. And honestly, I get so much good advice. Every day when I call my father, it's a kind of report on how the day went. When there is a decision I have to make, I always ask his advice. He’s extremely wise.”
Bernardo mulled over 100 names before deciding on Yolk, which he describes as “catchy, easy to remember and says fits with the idea of a new business being born.”
And while bank of dad has provided early-stage funding as an angel investor for this baby start-up, Yolk is very much Bernardo’s business. He has been involved at every step, personally testing the heat pads during trial phases, working closely with app developers to perfect the user experience, and recruiting the company’s roster of nine riders.
Long before Covid accelerated the trend towards online shopping and increased our appetite for food in (almost) an instant, the gig economy was coming under scrutiny for the way in which delivery drivers were being treated and paid.
As a small team, Bernardo has got to know his riders personally. They agree hours with Yolk and sign an exclusivity contract so they can’t work for anyone else during those hours.
“This is extremely important because you don’t want to wait for luxury food. We don't want them to pick up one order and then pick up another one, there’s no reason for a delay on our part. Of course it costs more to have those riders but that’s something that we're very willing to pay because we can assure the quality of those riders. And it's better for them to have a contract because they get paid per hour,” he says.
Riders have been trained to deliver high quality service to restaurant and client. In fact, Bernardo describes them as waiters. They call each customer by name, offering the personal touch that Bernardo sees as setting Yolk apart from other delivery services.
Somehow, in the whirlwind of setting up a business, Bernardo has also found time to partner with north London charity The Felix Project, which delivers surplus food that cannot be sold to schools and charities to help those most in need.
“I believe that every company should have a charity partner. Every time you place an order through Yolk, you're helping six people with their meals for the day.”
Each delivery comes with a tag for the customer. One side explains how the delivery has helped the Felix Project. On the reverse is. a QR code which links to a Spotify playlist tailored to the restaurant. “Italian classical music from an Italian restaurant and so on… We want to bring the atmosphere of being in the restaurant to your home both in taste and sound.”
A week after our interview, Barnardo will be returning to school for his final year of A-level studies – economics, business and geography – but he’s already scheduled business meetings during his study breaks and has a team at Yolk HQ cracking on with the day to day work.
“Our business is a triangle, we have three main things, the riders, customers and restaurants, and we have one person to take care of each part. And of course, as we grow we're going to have more people.”
Right on cue, as we start to wrap up our interview, Bernardo receives an alert on his phone and directs us to the office window with its sweeping view over Hyde Park. Pulling up, four floors below, is a Yolk rider decked out in bright yellow jacket with two lunchtime pizzas from Crazy Pizza, two miles away in Marylebone. Like Bernardo, we’ve previously experienced the disappointment of food turning up cold. Proof, as they say, may be in the pudding but we can confirm that each slice we tasted really was at the just-perfect temperature that we would have expected had we dined in.
And as we bit down on the last morsel of margharita, our thoughts returned to Wake Up to Money. It reported that prior to Covid, Britons were spending around £38 per month each on takeaways, home deliveries and meal kits, according to accountancy firm KPMG, a trend that was already growing. But between spring 2020 and spring 2021 average monthly spend per person reached £53.
Yolk’s customers are likely to spend more per head than the average Briton due to the calibre of restaurants it has partnered with. But as our appetite for takeaway deliveries grows so Bernardo will be hoping that hunger for food arriving at the right temperature grows with it – at least in his slice of the sector.