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Jeff Perera lost his job in 2019 and decided to become a stay-at-home dad. The family loved bagels, but getting one required a 45-minute drive, so he learned how to make them out of his kitchen. And then, once he got a bagel he liked, he kept going.
His wife told him to stop, because they had a freezer full of bagels. So they started giving them away. And then they started selling them, advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Then the pandemic hit, people were stuck at home looking at their social media feeds, and they discovered Perera’s makeshift bagel shop.
“We sort-of blew up,” Perera said. The Orlando-based Jeff’s Bagel Run now has 25 locations and hopes to get to 50 by the end of this year.
The pandemic has had a major impact on the restaurant industry but maybe the most unusual is this: It’s fueled a generation of bagel-centric concepts that are now expanding across the country. They include companies like Bagels & Co., PopUp Bagels, Barry’s Bagels, H&H Bagels, Call Your Mother and others.
Each of these concepts brings with it new ideas and menus, bringing to the space a wave of innovation. That could be important if this boom is to last longer than the previous bagel boom that hit the restaurant industry.
Bagel popularity
The bagel is at least 500 years old and can be traced to the early 17th century in Eastern Europe. They are hand-rolled, shaped into circles, boiled and then baked. The process gives them a crust and a dense, chewy texture.
Jewish immigrants brought bagels to the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries, making them popular in New York City. Consumer packaged goods companies like Lenders Bagels then emerged, shipping frozen bagels across the country to be sold in grocery stores, which helped familiarize the rest of the country with them.
Restaurant chains soon followed. By the 1990s, several of them emerged, largely using franchising to expand around the country. Bruegger’s was founded in Troy, New York, in 1983. Noah’s New York Bagels was founded in 1989. Manhattan Bagels was founded in 1987.
In 1995, Boston Chicken, which would later become Boston Market, formed a company called Progressive Bagel Concepts after acquiring three regional chains: Offerdahl’s Bagel Gourmet out of Florida, Bagel & Bagel out of Kansas City and Brackman Brothers out of Salt Lake City.
That brand would later become Einstein Brothers Bagels and it expanded rapidly through a combination of franchising and aggressive acquisitions of other bagel concepts, including Noah’s.
But, like most such explosions, this one quickly faded. Overexpansion put immense pressure on some of these companies, notably Einstein, which filed for bankruptcy in 2000. Both Einstein and Bruegger’s went through several ownership changes, including Einstein’s purchase of Bruegger’s in 2017. Both are now under Panera Brands.
Neither is what it once was. Bruegger’s closed about a third of its locations between 2014 and 2024. Einstein has closed about 9% of its locations over that same period. And now they face more competition.
Jeff’s Bagel Run has an extensive menu of coffee and other beverages along with bagels. | Photo courtesy of Jeff’s Bagel Run.
The pandemic
A remarkable number of industry trends are born out of brutal events. The Great Recession, for instance, led to a boom in frozen yogurt and better burger brands. And the pandemic apparently got people baking.
More than a third of Americans started a new hobby during the pandemic, according to Lending Tree. Baking was one such hobby. Sugar sales more than doubled in May 2020. Flour sales more than tripled.
Many of these people made bagels. And once they realized there was a market for those bagels, it was only a matter of time before they opened a brick-and-mortar.
Adam Goldberg started baking sourdough as a hobby during the pandemic and switched to bagels. He gave them away to friends and family and rising demand eventually led him to create PopUp Bagels in Manhattan. Its popularity took off almost immediately.
The funny part? “He was selling flood mitigation prior to this,” said Tory Bartlett, CEO of PopUp.
In 2020, Jeff Perera was doing pop-up shops and selling bagels at farmer’s markets, developing enough of a cult following that by 2021 he opened his first shop. “We decided five garage refrigerators and a house that smelled like bagels every day was probably getting to be a bit too much,” he said.
PopUp Bagels locations close at 3 p.m. and bagels are sold in packs of three. | Photo courtesy of PopUp Bagels.
Creative ideas
Many of these bagel chains bring with them unique and creative strategies to the business that they hope will set them all apart.
Arguably the most unique of these models belongs to PopUp Bagels. “You could take Danny Meyer and six others in the board room and I don’t know that they would come up with this foundation of a business,” Bartlett said.
PopUp locations open at 7 a.m. and close at 3 p.m., which enables a location to operate with fewer workers. The shops attract high-quality workers, including chefs who make the bagels. It doesn’t bother with items like sandwiches, keeping a simple menu of bagels and a rotating selection of schmears that changes every Thursday.
Oh, and you can’t just get one. It comes in three-packs priced from $13 to $15. Customers can also buy a dozen or the Big Box that sells for $90 and features 30 bagels with schmears. Average check is $24. “Adam was very mindful of the economics piece,” Bartlett said. Selling just one bagel at a time, is “hard to get the type of volume you need to be in the market.”
The bagels are served hot with a cup of cream cheese that customers dip the bagels in. “We don’t even slice our bagels,” Bartlett said.
PopUp Bagels operates 23 locations and expects to open 50 in this year. The company’s simple model and unit economics have attracted a lot of franchisees. Under Bartlett, the former chief brand officer of Moe’s Southwest Grill, the company is using a market-based approach to franchising, with larger operators, so franchisees aren’t competing with one another.
Not every bagel concept growing now was created out of some guy’s kitchen. Glu Hospitality, a Philadelphia-based restaurant operator, opened Bagels & Co. in 2020.
The chain operates eight locations, all company-run, around Philadelphia and in Florida. It doesn’t rule out franchising in the future but prefers this model to maintain quality control. Bagels & Co. is focusing at least in part on expanding near college campuses. One such location is on tap for Columbus, Ohio, near Ohio State University.
The chain serves a wide variety of bagels with flavors like Oreo and a just-as-wide selection of schmears, such as a cookie-loaded Cookie Monster flavor, that are sold in tubs ranging from $3.75 to $11.
Workers scoop the flavored, whipped cream cheeses into the tubs from containers at the front counter.
“I can compare it to a gelato stand when you walk in,” said Mike Marsh, who joined the company in 2023 and is now its CEO. “A lot of other bagel concepts don’t really lead with cream cheese. We lead with both. We let customers sample flavors similar to what an ice cream store would do.”
Bagels & Co. serves a wide selection of bagels and cream cheeses. | Photo courtesy of Bagels & Co.
What’s different now?
Executives with the bagel brands believe they’re creating almost a new category. They are not simply mimicking concepts of the past but are blazing a new trail. They see themselves more like the better burger trend that’s been more sustainable than the froyo craze that emerged around the same time 15 years ago.
“You look at some of the franchisors like Five Guys, with the better burger business, or Jersey Mike’s, with better sub sandwiches, we see ourselves in the same way,” Bartlett said. “We’re a better bagel. I truly believe we are bringing bagels to people who haven’t thought about them before.”
Marsh agrees that the bagel concepts emerging today bring a different sensibility and different model to the business.
“I’m a millennial,” he said. “There wasn’t any funky cream cheeses or these bagel flavors. You’ve kind-of seen this emergence over the past two or three years.”
It’s also worth pointing out the social media aspect to all of this. The bagel boom of the mid-2020s is fueled largely by the rapid spread of information. Each of these brands effectively leverages social media to gain a following.
Bagels & Co. went viral recently when an Oreo bagel with Cookie Monster cream cheese exploded on social media. “It changed the dynamic of one of our stores,” Marsh said. “The sales have never really gone down ever since that video.”
And of course, Jeff’s Bagel Run might not be here if customers hadn’t discovered his menu on Facebook and Instagram. Thousands of people would join queues on Facebook to buy bagels, enough that they would sell as much as 40 dozen a day.
Perera and his wife Danielle had a commercial mixer in the pantry and extension cords scattered around the garage connecting those five refrigerators, each in a different outlet so they would not blow a fuse.
When they decided to open their first location, social media helped again. They sold their house to pay for the first location without debt, but fans of the bagels funded a Kickstarter campaign, raising $20,000. When their first location opened, there was a line out the door.
“Information is spread a lot faster and a lot easier in our world now,” Perera said. “The internet has given us such an opportunity to find ways to create great products and share them with others. So I think this is probably sparking and moving a little faster than the Einsteins and the Bruegger’s of the world.”
