KANSAS CITY, MO — The commissary bakery is the hub of Berkeley, CA-based Boichik Bagels. It has 12,000 square feet of production space and 1,000 square feet of retail space with customer seating. Office space and ancillary functions round out the rest of the square footage. The bakery produces about 10,000 bagels daily for Boichik’s retail locations, outposts, wholesale customers and online orders, which ship nationwide.
“I would rather make all dough in one spot and have quality control and scale it efficiently versus everyone making their own dough,” said Emily Winston, CEO and founder of Boichik Bagels.
When it comes to bagel flavors, Boichik sticks to the basics. Plain, Everything, onion, sesame, salt and pepper, poppy seed, egg, cinnamon raisin, pumpernickel, and pumpernickel raisin swirl are menu mainstays, along with a few others. The retail stores also offer bialys and an assortment of cream cheeses, lox, cookies, bagel chips, sandwiches, salads and coffee.
While Emily fully embraces her mechanical engineering background, she’s adamant about not being called a baker.
“I consider myself an engineer who wandered into baking,” she said. “I’m not afraid of getting equipment, figuring it out and maintaining it. I love it. To me, that’s fun. I don’t bake. I have a phenomenal baking staff.”
That staff includes head baker Armando Carapia, who oversees the entire production process, from dough mixing to packaging to truck loading. He watches carefully as bagel dough moves from the customized mixer to the bagel forming line, troubleshooting the technology as needed.
When the bagels are proofed and ready for baking, Boichik’s lead baker Battumur Dorj manages the old-school New York boil-and-bake method, which includes hand-flipping bagel boards as they rotate in the Reed revolving rack oven.
Emily has also surrounded herself with a solid operations and support team.
Rob Soviero, Boichik’s COO, oversees the bakery’s overarching operations and human resources functions, and Cheryl Lew, Emily’s longtime mentor, serves as head pastry chef and advisor.
“I’ve been here since day one,” Cheryl said. “This is the most successful — and the most modern — business I’ve ever consulted with. Emily’s driving the bus; I put gas in sometimes.”
On the day of Craft to Crumb’s visit, Cheryl was focused on a couple of ancillary offerings. She was experimenting with black and pink cookies for Valentine’s Day — a raspberry and chocolate variation of the bakery’s standard black and white cookies — and conducting a final trial run of the challah program before its rollout to stores.
Currently, the factory runs one shift, and daily bagel production is a fraction of what the automated line is capable of.
“I built this space for growth,” Emily said. “Right now, we’re not running a full shift, but eventually, we will run almost non-stop. The BakTek dough line can run up to 12,000 bagels per hour, so we’ve got a lot of room. The infrastructure is also in place for the addition of a second complete baking line.”
The bakers fire up the kettle and oven at 2 a.m. every day. Production starts with the cold-proofed bialy dough rounds, which are shaped, filled with an onion filling and baked. Then, it’s all-hands-on-deck for the bagels. The first batches are earmarked for the outpost locations, which receive finished product. Those bagels are loaded on a box truck that starts deliveries at 6 a.m.
“Our outpost model makes it faster, easier and less expensive to build out stores and expand our reach,” Emily explained. “We don’t need to train as many bakers, and the staff can focus on selling bagels, cream cheese, lox, sandwiches, coffee, cookies and other items. We bake as close to delivery time as possible so our outpost customers receive the freshest bagel possible.”
Once the outpost orders are filled, bakers turn their attention to orders from the retail stores, which bake bagels on-site every day. Each store receives racks of proofed and formed bagels every afternoon for baking off the next morning, along with cream cheese, lox, bagel chips, cookies and Boichik Bagels merchandise.
Emily is ramping up the retail and wholesale sides of the business simultaneously.
“We’re doing retail and wholesale together because it makes for a stronger business,” she explained. “If one falls down, the other piece is there to support it. Both channels should make the company money. Plus, I want to find out if there’s a future in nationwide distribution.”
While Emily’s initial mission was to introduce authentic New York bagels to the West Coast, it’s never been just about the bagels. She also wanted to create the sense of community that bagels helped forge during her East Coast upbringing.
“For me, bagels are a nostalgic food,” Emily said. “At Jewish events, they are a life cycle thing. You’re a part of life cycle events, and you’re a part of people’s lives and traditions. With Boichik Bagels, I wanted to bring that here.”
She does that by hosting events such as Mahjong Mondays, Saturday morning bakery tours and pop-up bagel stands.
As she thinks about the future, Emily is already entertaining yet another inkling: What if she could replicate the traditional boil-and-bake method with machinery and still produce a quality artisan bagel?
“I want to create a fully automated artisan-level baking line that uses a stone-deck tunnel oven,” she said. “I call it artisan at scale. The bagels must be awesome. That’s the whole point of this enterprise. I think I can replicate the boil-and-bake system with machinery and still get that same awesome product at the end of the line. I want to be the one who gets there and makes that happen with existing technology.”
Game-changing innovation often starts with an inkling.
This story has been adapted from the June | Q2 2024 Craft to Crumb mini-mag. Read the full story in the digital issue here.
