Emily Winston’s bagel saga began with her upbringing in New Jersey, where she continued the story in Berkeley, California in 2019 with Boichik Bagels. Using her experience from a Cornell mechanical engineering degree, she engineered a bagel worthy of eating on the West Coast and is now devoted to spreading the gospel in California.
BruinLife’s Emily Hsi sat down with Emily Winston to learn a little more about the Bay Area bagel.
BruinLife: What’s your bagel order?
Emily Winston: It’s on our menu, and it’s called The Mensch. It’s either a sesame or a pumpernickel bagel with whitefish salad, tomato and cucumber.
BL: How did you go from mechanical engineering at Cornell to managing a bagel empire?
EW: That was not part of my plan when I was an undergrad. I started out doing automotive and working with motors. I’m an engineer! I like to make stuff, figure things out, build things and have physical stuff. So bagels started as this hobby. I moved to the Bay in 2010, and I didn’t like those bagels because I’m from the East Coast. I thought that I could figure out how to make something great, so I started researching everything about bagels. I went through lots of trial and error and I would run everything — I’d be like, okay, I can do A, B and C, and run a test. If I do more levels of this much, this much, this much, I’ll bring it to my friend from the East Coast and get their thoughts. Then I would think, next time I make it, we’ll iterate, so it was a whole scientific process. It just evolved that I created this great bagel, and people told me to sell them. The whole thing was an accident, but when I looked at the numbers, it looked like a really fantastic business. So I decided, I’m gonna do it. I’m going to try making a little bagel shop out of it.
BL: How does your engineering background inform your current business?
EW: I felt like I was at a big disadvantage at the beginning because I had no background in food. I didn’t know how to run a restaurant. It was very, very scary. But then once we were successful and we started to grow, then my background was actually very huge. I come at this as an engineer and I think, how do we efficiently scale? How do we add more automation to make less work, but make the same fantastic bagel at the end of it? I’m now one of the world’s foremost bagel engineers. There’s not been a lot of tech investment in the bagel space to date, so I’m pioneering and bringing bagels into the new century.
BL: Did you expect or hope for your pop-up to expand into the establishment it is today?
EW: I was thinking to myself that maybe it would be really successful and maybe we would grow. I thought that in five years I’d build another shop. It’s been way faster, so now we’re at six years and 12 shops. I didn’t really plan on it growing at such a rate, but it’s blown away anything I had possibly considered.
BL: You’ve already expanded from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. Where would you like to open your next location?
EW: I want to go global. I’m looking into building a franchise program, but I would really love to go international. I would really want to go to Asia and I want to go to Japan. I feel like it would be really cool. I see on Instagram that there’s a lot of bagels and great American stuff over there. I need to find the right partner, and I want to go.
BL: Do you want to make bagels forever? Where would you like to take the rest of your career?
EW: It’s hard to plan for forever. I have no plans to leave right now. But at some point, I might say I’m done. Or maybe it grows to the point where I need to step aside and it needs to grow into something much bigger, and I think I’d be more of an advisor. A lot of companies, as they become really successful, outgrow the founder a bit. So maybe that’ll happen, and I would go into other consulting work.
