“We’ve changed so much,” says Johnnie Tate, co-founder of Yard Sale Pizza. In 2017 Yard Sale won this OFM Award, thanks to the high quality, eminently shareable delivery pizzas he and best friend Nick Buckland had developed in east London. Since then they’ve expanded from three to nine sites, with a 10th on the way, all in neighbourhood locations on either side of the Thames. Crucially, they still do their own delivery, but have upgraded to e-bikes.
“We’ve stayed away from the glitz of central locations, and we’ve steered away from dark kitchens and outsourcing delivery,” says Tate who, along with Buckland, still answers any customer complaints.
Their strapline is “handmade, hand-delivered from dough to door”. The dough is fermented for between 48 and 72 hours, and they source their mozzarella and tomatoes from Naples. “We’ve engineered our pizza to be London’s best delivery pizza,” claims Tate. There’s no insistence on rigorous Italian authenticity, though. On the contrary, Yard Sale collaborates with a crew of chefs, comedians, musicians and more when creating limited-edition toppings: everything from turkey chilli to soy pork. There’s a similar approach to branding and merchandise, designed in collaboration with local artists and designers.
All this helped when the pandemic began. “Being embedded in neighbourhoods and having our own delivery service meant we had relationships with our customers,” says Buckland.
Though small, all Yard Sale sites offer the option of eating in-house on an endearingly ramshackle selection of tables and chairs, and when Covid arrived, a sizable part of their custom was dine-in. “We did have to slay some sacred cows, like going cashless and streamlining the menu,” says Tate. “One important thing that’s changed is delivery times. Now our average time is 16 minutes and the max is 30.”
Yard Sale delivers to pubs, bars, tap rooms and bottle shops across the capital, many of whom, “don’t want to run kitchens”. Indeed, Tate tells me some pubs are happy for customers to come in for pizza and a soda. Which is a relief, because I’ve done this several times as I live just outside their catchment area. Buckland laughs when I tell him. “We get lots of people asking us if we can extend the radius just a bit,” he says. “But the longer our pizza spends on the road the lower the quality. We’d rather deliver a better service to fewer people.”
Sad though I am it doesn’t entail delivering to my front door, it’s a strategy that is clearly working.
yardsalepizza.com
