BERKELEY, CA — Game-changing innovation often starts with an inkling, that quiet voice that prods, “What if?” Deciding whether to pursue the answer isn’t always cut and dried. Rarely is it easy. But once the quest begins, turning back isn’t an option, especially when the idea starts taking shape.
That’s how Boichik Bagels in Berkeley, CA, got its start … from an inkling. When New Jersey native Emily Winston, the bakery’s founder and CEO, learned her favorite New York City bagel chain had closed its doors for good, a sense of nostalgia nudged her just enough to make her wonder, “What if I could make an authentic New York-style bagel?”
Emily was raised Jewish in suburban New Jersey, and bagels have been a fixture throughout her life. After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, she went to work for General Motors and eventually landed in the Bay Area, far from her favorite bagel shop.
“When I came to the Bay Area, I bemoaned the lack of good bagels,” Emily said. “I decided I wouldn’t eat bagels until I went home for a visit. Then I got the terrible news that H&H Bagels, my ‘Holy Bagel,’ my gold standard of bagels on the Upper West Side, had closed its doors. I was distraught.”
After tasting New York-style bagels from a San Francisco pop-up, Emily began to think she could create an even more authentic product. She began experimenting with recipes and plying her monthly potluck dinner group and martial arts school friends with bagels created in her kitchen.
“It became an obsessive hobby,” Emily admitted.
“You have a sign outside your establishment. Now, you also need to have a sign digitally across 150 platforms. Use technology to help you.”
After five years of trial and error, Emily was confident she’d perfected a boil-and-bake bagel recipe reminiscent of her East Coast childhood.
She obtained a cottage food license to sell bagels out of her home kitchen, and she brought bagels to the Eat Real Festival. They were such a hit that a local reporter proclaimed them “the best in the state of California.” That’s when bagel connoisseurs descended on Emily’s home, forming lines that stretched for blocks.
“It would take me seven hours of work with my KitchenAid mixer and electric oven to make nine dozen bagels,” Emily recalled. “I decided that if I was going to make bagels, I wanted a bagel shop with real equipment. I did a lot of soul-searching to figure out what I wanted to do. Continuing the cottage food thing didn’t make sense, and a commissary kitchen didn’t make sense. The only thing that made sense to me was to open my own shop.”
Storefronts in the Bay Area can be hard to come by, and rent isn’t cheap, but fate stepped in. Months earlier, Emily had been introduced to Noah Alper, founder of the iconic Noah’s Bagels chain. He called her out of the blue one day to let her know the corporation that purchased Noah’s Bagels had closed the brand’s original location on College Avenue in Berkeley. He thought she should take a look.
“It was bashert,” Emily said, using the Yiddish word for meant to be. “It was a great location. I had to take it.”
The first Boichik Bagels brick-and-mortar location opened in the compact 1,200-square-foot space in November 2019. The company’s name — derived from the Yiddish word boychik, which is a term of endearment for a cute little boy — honors her Jewish grandmother who, after seeing Emily with extremely short hair for the first time several years earlier, exclaimed, “Oy! Such a boychik!”
“It took a leap of faith,” Emily said of the move. “I didn’t even have all the money when I signed the lease. It was one of those crazy things where you have to act and trust the path will fall into place as you’re walking.”
That’s an inkling at work.
The retail shop was an instant success, especially with transplanted New Yorkers who craved an authentic taste of home. In 2021, The New York Times ran the article, “The Best Bagels are in California (Sorry, New York),” heaping praise on Boichik Bagels.
“The article blew the roof off the place,” Emily said. “I had to do some more soul-searching. I could sit with my one fabulously successful bagel shop, or I could go into the unknown … I started thinking about building a commissary.”
Her vision included finding a way to automate more of the manual production tasks, specifically hand rolling and forming dough and moving full bagel boards from the line to baking racks. This level of automation was unheard of for a retail bagel operation, but Emily was convinced it was possible. She just needed the right equipment suppliers … and about $5 million.
For the equipment, she partnered with BakTek, a supplier of bagel forming equipment, and Apex Motion Control, which supplies cobots and robots to the baking industry.
A small business bank loan was out of reach for the capital investment needed, and for various reasons, Emily didn’t want to accept venture capital. So, she tried crowdsourcing and raised over $1 million in her first outing.
The 18,000-square-foot bakery opened in March 2023. Its main attraction is the two-lane BakTek bagel forming line that’s seamlessly integrated with Apex’s Baker-Bot cobot, which moves bagel boards from the line to baking racks. The system is housed behind a floor-to-ceiling, wall-length window that allows customers to view the production process in action. As an added bit of fun, Emily asked Apex to program the cobot arm so it waves to its audience.
“I designed the line myself,” Emily said, “and BakTek and Apex worked together to put the two lines together. Putting industrial equipment on display is something no one else has done. It’s the main show for customers. Watching automation at work is a really neat thing. It’s fun and very satisfying.”
The opening of the commissary bakery was quickly followed by two additional retail stores and three outpost locations. Emily likens Boichik’s growth strategy to one of her favorite childhood strategy games, Civilization, in which players must build cities.
“I feel like that’s what I’m doing,” she said. “I’ve got my maps, and we’re sending out our bagel armies to conquer. It’s fun, and the world wants more good bagels.”
This story has been adapted from the June | Q2 2024 Craft to Crumb mini-mag. Read the full story in the digital issue here.
