Why We Started YogurtYork

Founder stories tend to be written backwards, with a tidy insight at the beginning that nobody actually had. Ours started with something considerably more mundane: irritation.

The irritation

Every dessert menu in Mumbai asks you to make the same trade. Something enjoyable, which you will regret. Or something virtuous, which you will not finish. Nothing that does both honestly.

The health-dessert category made this worse rather than better. Products marketed as guilt-free that were sweeter than what they replaced. “Low fat” on a label with more sugar behind it. It was a category built on marketing rather than on formulation.

Why frozen yogurt

Because the problem was already solved elsewhere and had simply never been executed properly here.

Frozen yogurt is built on cultured dairy. That gives you live cultures, protein and calcium in a dessert, at a fraction of the fat of premium ice cream. India, meanwhile, has one of the world’s oldest cultured-dairy traditions. The idea should have landed here easily.

It did not, for a specific reason: almost everything sold in India as frozen yogurt was a flavoured powder mix. Sweet, uncultured, and tasting nothing like the real thing. People had tried “frozen yogurt” and concluded they did not care for it, when what they had actually tried was soft-serve with a different label.

The first year

We spent it almost entirely on the base. Not on branding, not on store design, not on a menu. On one recipe.

Culture strains, because they determine how the tang reads — refreshing or harsh. Milk sourcing, because solids content decides whether the product is creamy or icy. Sugar level, because too little is unpleasant and too much erases the point. Overrun, because air content decides how it feels in the mouth. Serving temperature, because a few degrees is the difference between silky and stiff.

Dozens of batches. Long arguments about whether a particular version was tart enough. It was, in hindsight, an unreasonable amount of time to spend before selling anything, and it is the decision we are most glad we made.

The name

Dyaloni Foods Pvt Ltd is the company — sourcing, production, quality, standards. The part you never see.

YogurtYork is the brand — the counter, the flavour wall, the topping bar, the cup in your hand.

We keep the two distinct because they do different jobs, and because we expect Dyaloni Foods Pvt Ltd to build more than one thing over time.

Where we are

Mumbai. A startup, genuinely — not the kind that says startup while operating forty outlets. A small team, a small footprint, and a deliberate decision to grow only as fast as we can stay good.

Pune, Navi Mumbai, Thane and Bengaluru are on the map. They will happen when they can happen properly.

What we are actually trying to do

Make a dessert that does not ask you to choose. Price it fairly. Label it honestly. Do not claim it is a health food, because it is not.

That is the whole plan. It is not a very dramatic one.