How bagel businesses grow on Hotplate
Cover photo by Holey Dough & Co
A bag of fresh bagels is a delicacy. Bagels are one of the most successful categories on Hotplate. Just like bread - once you’ve nailed your base recipe and method, you can have fun with toppings and flavor variations and keep customers coming back.
In short, here’s what we’ve learned works for bagel businesses:
Sell set quantities (4-pack, half dozen, dozen) where customers choose their flavors
Add cream cheeses or schmears
Consistent drop and pickup schedules
Pre-orders for markets, partnering with local shops for pickups
Why the Hotplate drop model works for bagel businesses
Bagels boom on Hotplate. From bread nerds just experimenting all the way up to bustling brick-and-mortars, we’ve seen bagel lovers at every stage of the game use Hotplate to run and scale their businesses. Many of them started as pandemic baking projects or casual side hustles that quickly grew into full-on businesses through customer word-of-mouth.
Grabbing a bag of bagels is a ritual, and one that has only grown more celebrated in recent years. Customers - all over the country - are eager to discover and support a bagel that’s made fresh and locally over those sitting in plastic sleeves on a grocery store shelf.
The drop model is a great, low-cost approach to starting a bagel business. Bagels taste incredible straight out of the oven, but lose their ideal texture fast. With drops, you can bake to exact demand and hand them off within hours, so customers experience that perfect chewy crust rather than something dry and stale. It becomes an experience, not just a product, and gives customers something to savor and share about on social media.
Bagels are made in tight batches that require rolling, boiling, baking, and seasoning dozens at a time. It’s far more ideal to plan your workflow around confirmed orders that have already been paid for, rather than doing all that work and hoping people show up. Drops let you lock in batch counts ahead of time so every bake session is efficient, predictable, and profitable.
How bagel businesses scale with Hotplate
Because bread and sourdough goods are some of the most widely permitted foods under cottage food laws, many bagel-bakers start businesses from home and use Hotplate from day 1. Many bakers also set up their Hotplate storefront and build a customer list while they’re in the testing and refining phase. This is especially useful if you’re handing out samples to friends and neighbors because you can guide them to subscribe so they’re the first to know when sales officially open. It’s always best to start building your customer list before you even post anything for sale!
Hotplate can be used to sell a dozen bagels or 12,000. Many bakers will start doing drops even if they only have capacity to bake for a few customers. Over time, as a baker’s capacity or menu size increases, its easy to add more inventory and items to each drop - the Hotplate system grows with you!
How our bagel businesses typically operate
Similar to bread bakers on Hotplate, many of our bagel sellers operate of their homes and do weekly drops. It’s easy to create repeat customers who look forward to their weekend ritual of buying a bag of bagels.
As demand grows, bagel droppers may outgrow their home setup and graduate to a commercial kitchen space with more room to mix, rise, boil, and bake. Many offer porch pickups, have a booth at a farmers market, collaborate with local businesses, or have a pickup window at their kitchen space. Expanding into catering for nearby companies and offices is a common next channel. Who doesn’t love a bagel breakfast spread?
The typical bagel dropper schedule
Because bagels require a few days worth of prep, many bagel sellers open orders several days before customers will pick up. It’s most common for storefronts to have a drop that goes live early or mid-week, then offer pickups over the weekend.
Examples to inspire you
Brick Street Bagels started with a home oven and a bike
Before Brick Street Bagels was on the cover of Edible Boston and on air with Boston Public Radio, it was something Jordan did out of his South End apartment when he wasn’t at his day job. He spent 9 months baking from home and delivering bagels by bike to neighbors, friends, and new customers.
Brick Street’s operations then moved into a nearby kitchen, where Jordan and his partner Andrew baked from 2:30am until 8am, drove to a nearby park and sold bagels on a folding table to a line of eager customers.
Many months of park popups later, Brick Street returned to the South End, this time as a permanent popup. They partnered with a neighborhood bar and restaurant to serve fresh bagels 5 days a week.
2 years and over 500 drops later, Brick Street still drops on Hotplate weekly. Preorders open early in the week for pickups Wednesday through Sunday mornings, 7:30-10am. Customers can get a 2 pack, half dozen, or dozen, and and choose their flavors when they arrive. Bagels are baked fresh, always.
Holey Dough and Co is making the best bagel in Chicago
When he was laid off from his day job, Jake challenged himself to make the perfect bagel and turned it into a side hustle. What started as an “obsessive passion” quickly took off and is now regularly called Chicago’s best bagel, known for it’s sturdy exterior and steaming, soft interior.
Jake’s bagels are in high demand, and snagging a preorder is no easy feat. The Infatuation summed it up in their guide to Chicago’s Best Bagels:
Chicago’s best new bagels are also the hardest to get. Holey Dough & Co. is a pop-up with limited bagels that drop at a random time each Tuesday. They sell out in seconds, and unless you stare at your phone all day until the notification text appears, you won’t beat the hundreds of others doing the same thing. Frustrating to stare for hours at a blank screen only to be denied? Yes. But your dedication will be rewarded with huge, squishy bagels that are perfect for ripping and dipping.
Another review calls them “a pop-up with excellent bagels that are available for roughly five seconds on a Tuesday.”
One of the coolest part of Jake’s story is that he started with small, consistent drops of 36 bagels, or 9 4-packs. On November 21, 2024, he dropped 50 4-packs, sold out immediately, with more customers on the waitlist. A year later, he’s more than tripled his volume, trying to get Holey Dough in the hands of as many Chicagoans - and visitors - as possible.
Holey Dough did almost 30 small drops on Hotplate, steadily building his subscriber list before scaling up production.
How Neighborhood Bagels became Miami’s favorite weekend ritual
Neighborhood Bagels is Simona Greenberg’s love letter to her Miami community and to the New York-style bagels she grew up with.
When she moved to Miami, she tried every bagel shop but couldn’t find one that satisfied her craving for the bagels of her childhood. After months of testing recipes and 600 bagels later, she got it just right. She went from sharing bagels with close friends to running and scaling a small batch operation out of her apartment in Midtown, where she hand-rolled the bagels, cold-proofed them overnight, and baked them fresh for Saturday morning pickups.
It’s never just been about bagels for Simona. It’s about people, connection, and belonging - and bringing strangers together over something simple and good. Neighborhood Bagels became a weekly ritual for locals and garnered attention from The Infatuation and Miami Times.
Through weekly drops, Simona was able to grow her business efficiently and scale at her own pace. She’d land on her menu (bagels & spreads) on Sunday/Monday, announce the menu on Instagram, open pre-orders on Tuesday at 10am, and often be sold out in minutes. She’d shop for any remaining special ingredients for her spreads on Thursday It’s a system that allowed her stay true to her roots - connecting with her neighbors, one bagel at a time - while still scaling up in a smart, sustainable way.
Thinking of starting a bagel business? Your first steps
Create a Hotplate storefront: hotplate.com/sign-up
Set your drop schedule (when do orders open, when do you prep, and when/where are pick ups?)
Pick a menu rotation (how often do offer new or seasonal items?)
Understand your inventory capacity at your baking location (even if that’s just a dozen bagels at home!)
With those key details figured out, you can schedule your first drop!
