A love letter to bagels & neighborhood spots

I spoke with wildly popular Boichik Bagel's founder Emily Winston on how she approaches growth and community and why she refuses venture capital funding.

In the first 24 hours after I moved to the Bay Area three years ago, I tried to get my bearings by going for a run, grabbing a coffee and looking for a treat. Each activity, the run through the Berkeley Hills, ordering a cappuccino from Cole Coffee’s window and getting in line at the bagel shop, has since become a worn-in tradition to center myself in the daily life of a neighborhood. My bagel shop is also no longer mine, as it’s a rapidly growing business, with plans to expand to grocery stores and new locations.

The bagels are tasty, sure, but I’m really buying bagels to keep a constant in my life. I’m writing this with Boichik bagels half eaten on the table in front of me, sitting next to a friend who requested a bagel order on a bad day. As Boichik grows, my relationship with the woman taking my order who knows I have a nut allergy and makes sure to remind me they’ll be careful, and my sense of pride and ownership over a spot I frequent, are at risk.

I spoke to Boichik’s founder Emily Winston, in her recently opened bagel factory in West Berkeley about her approach to growth and community. She started Boichik because she missed her own neighborhood bagel spot that had shut down. Now that she has a successful bagel business of her own, she’s juggling making a good product with making sure people are happy with their experiences. As she grows, she believes, first and foremost, in continuing to make a really, really good bagel.

Winston agrees her business is selling not only bagels but also the relationship people have with the stories around those products.

“There’s objective reality and then there’s everyone’s story. Every person is a story machine,” she told me.

Though she sells bagels for a profit, not out of the goodness of her heart, she values the entire experience any customer has around eating her bagels. She compared how she values success to a video game she played growing up. “You’re balancing, in general a well-rounded score. There’s the money in your bank account, there’s the cities or the country treasury and then there’s the happiness of the people and that affects the score, like how many people, how happy they are, all these different pieces go into your score.”

Someone’s story about an experience is perhaps even more important and impactful than the experience itself. Winston told me the story of Noah’s Bagels, founded by a New Yorker looking for bagels at home in Berkeley. As Noah’s expanded from its original location on College Avenue that eventually became Boichik’s brick-and-mortar birthplace, into a behemoth sold to Einstein Bro. Bagels, the perception of the quality of his bagels eroded. “A lot of people, their story became ‘it was good when it was the first shop, the first three shops, but then he grew too fast and the quality dropped and he sold out’” she said.

Winston cares deeply about peoples’ experiences with her bagels and the stories they eventually tell each other and themselves about Boichik. “The bagels are my most objective priority, my top priority. But I give a lot of points to the culture. How do we have a strong company culture and scale that?” When I asked her if she was worried about alienating her current clientele by growing, she told me “maybe one day people will say ‘I’m going to take a trip to the original Boichik.’ Just the way I’ve gone to the original Starbucks in Seattle.”

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Before Winston had dreams of Boichik, she was experimenting with bagel recipes in her Alameda home, trying to recreate her own emotional support bagel while mourning the closure of H&H Bagels in New York City. She spent seven years testing bagels, so understands what it means to love a bagel in part because the bagel tastes good but perhaps more because it represents a history and collection of memories. She got to work, experimenting on what was a self-described obsessive hobby. Winston engaged in a variety of strategies to make an H&H lookalike bagel—from taking classes like entrepreneurship on the side to wandering into bagel shops while visiting New York and asking as many questions as she could. Her friends throughout the Bay Area enjoyed the monthly bagel tests, but a professor eventually pushed her to try bagel making professionally.

At the start, “I was making it for me, but also for a New York area Jew who loves food and wanted this really awesome bagel,” she said. Her original customers might have been searching for an H&H bagel, or at the very least something that resembled what they’d known on the East Coast, but as Boichik has grown, Winston is no longer only targeting those ex-New Yorkers chasing a fond memory. She laughed when I told her my boyfriend, who is Christian and Arab, loves grabbing Boichik’s bagel and lox on the weekends.

Boichik debuted at Oakland’s Eat Real Festival & Winston’s bagels found some fans. She soon started announcing pop-ups out of her garage on her Facebook page or Mailchimp email list and 100 people showed up, lining up down the street. The Bay Area had good bagels and they sold out in the first few minutes.

Her company has grown on its own, funded by small investors and creative debt fundraising. At each level of her growth—from making bagels in her garage to expanding into a factory and new locations—she has raised money directly from investors. Some are sophisticated investors and others she said have never done any type of direct investing. When she expanded into Palo Alto and decided to build a factory, she raised money by selling gift cards at a discounted price and a bond offering on a crowdfunding site that pays interests to small investors. She raised about $5 million to build the West Berkeley plant and is currently trying to expand her bagel shop into grocery stores.

Boichik’s new plant in West Berkeley, with packaged bagels preparing to be shipped out

When she’s been approached by those with venture funding, she’s refused. “This is my art, this is my masterpiece that I’ve created and that’s important. Yes I’m making money doing it… I don’t know what I would do with myself if someone was like here’s a hundred million dollars take a hike,” she said.

Valuing a culture has in part kept her from being enticed by a large check from the venture world. “VC says you have to scale. They would say ‘oh we’re going to do this and now we’re gonna sell to, Panera Bread or some bullshit. And I don’t want that. This is not just a business. Yes, I’m making my living doing this. But for me there’s so much love behind this.”

Before this apartment, I’d moved every nine months—to college, to internships, to new cities for work and finally to an apartment on a tree-lined street with a house across the way that is decorating for Halloween. What I lack in apartment loyalty, I make up for in food loyalty. I’m still talking about the best arepas my brother and I ate over and over again at a small Venezualan spot in Queenstown when we spent a summer in a van nearly 10 years ago. Though Boichik is no longer a single location on College Avenue, there’s love behind it for me too. It reminds me of a Jewish childhood, and of creating adult traditions. And so I will just as obsessively recommend Boichik as regularly as I rave about the donuts that defined my Chicago years and the arepas that defined my New York City years.