The pandemic didn’t just change habits. It made entire business models reinvent themselves. In the case of Ultra Pão, the impact was direct on the heart of the operation: the daily consumption of fresh bread.
“I sell my product frozen, but my client sells it fresh. He is delivering freshness at that moment when we leave the house to buy the warm bread at the bakery. You don’t stock freshness”, recalls Rafael Mendes, co-founder of the brand in an interview with From Zero to Toprecorded during the immersion, an event held by XP Educação, Galapos and InfoMoney and XP Empresas.
With consumers going to the bakery less every day, the business was at risk. Fresh bread lost space to industrialized products. And the company needed to react quickly.
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The first response was to launch a line adapted to the new scenario. The Home Bake line was born, frozen products for finishing at home. But the real leap came from a new challenge. How to reinvent a 3,000-year-old product, like bread?
“We need to find a solution to package this freshness, so that my product is a little more perennial at the point of sale and allows me to remain healthy for as long as this pandemic period lasts. If I could take this product out of the cold chain, my business would change”, recalls Rafael.
It was at this moment that the development of our own technology began, bringing innovation to an ancient product. The result was a long-lasting bread, without preservatives and outside the cold chain.
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“Since then, we began incessant research after some European references that it was necessary to develop a technology to make bread shelf-stable, that is, at room temperature, without a cold chain, without any type of preservative, but that remains healthy”, says the co-founder.
Technology brought new possibilities
With innovation, Ultra Pão began to attract investors and changed the perception of the company in the market. It gained space on other fronts such as online sales,
export and remote markets.
According to Mendes, the entry of partners brought governance and helped make the business more attractive to the market.
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“The Ceratti family, from Mortadelas Ceratti, were our first partners. With an audited balance sheet… governance, this expanded the capacity to raise larger checks and then interest in funds also began to seek us out to eventually become part of our capital”, he concludes.
To find out more details about Ultra Pão’s challenges and achievements, see the full episode on . The program is available in its podcast version on the main streaming platforms such as , , , and
About From Zero to Top
The Do Zero ao Topo podcast is a production of InfoMoney and brings, every week, the stories of prominent women and men in the Brazilian market to tell their story, sharing the biggest challenges faced along the way and the main strategies used in building the business.
