Celebrate Bagel Week-end with Bantam Bagels

I was excited to get an offer of new and original Bantam Bagel frozen products.   Like nine million other viewers of Shark Tank, I first came familiar with founders  Nick and Elyse Oleksak when I saw them on the TV show in 2018 pitching their Bantam Bagels.  

We really liked the “everything bagel stuffed with vegetable cream cheese.   And we know we would love the original flavor of a plain bagel stuffed with cream cheese because we prefer our bagels plain and without onion and poppyseed on them. 

We also enjoyed the bacon and egg bagel bite.  This is also a classic. Nick and Elyse Oleksak, are continuing to expand into even more categories – pancakes and even marinara sauce pizza bagel bites

Owners Nick and Elyse have not changed the description of their product since they first sold it:  “New York City’s original mini stuffed bagels. “Crispy on the outside, cream cheese stuffed on the inside.”   

 

The couple had a mission from the moment they invented the homemade bagels bites in their Brooklyn apartment.   In less than 4 years they had opened a small, retail shop on Bleecker Street, which had lines when the shop was open  Distribution in over 16,000 stores nationwide , having two babies along the way. 

A year after the shop opened, Oprah Winfrey featured Bantam Bagels on her Oprah’s Favorite Things 2014 list.   Starbucks’s decision to add three of the flavors — original, french toast, and everything jump-started national awareness and accessibility to the doughnut holes of the bagel world even more.

 That following January, the Oleksak appeared on “Shark Tank,” where I first saw them along with about nine million other viewers.  Pitching the Bantam Bagel concept to the television show’s celebrity panel of investors with the hopes of winning financialbacking and support for the business venture, was, in their words, “the toughest, most rigorous interview we have ever experienced.” They secured a deal with Lori Greiner, the prolific inventor affectionately known as the “Queen of QVC” shopping network. Ms. Greiner offered the company $275,000 in exchange for 25% equity.  Their decade anniversary update is one of Shark Tanks biggest success stories.

The Shark Tank deal resulted in increased sales from  $200,000 to $2.1 million in less than a year.   Current sales at approximately $20 million with nationwide distribution in traditional grocery, club stores, e-commerce and food service.

Lancaster Colony purchased the company for $34 million last year, to add to their breads and frozen breakfast food portfolio.  The couple still runs the operations, which includes Starbucks and many more institutional food service channels. 

The origin of the bagel, at best contested and murky, still surprisingly similar to that of the croissant.   The croissant’s creation in honor of a victory over the Ottoman Empire in the shape of either a Turkish flag symbol or headband, the Jewish-Viennese baker who came up with the first bagel recipe late in the 17th century designed a small bread in the shape of a riding stirrup (beugel, in Austrian German) as a gift to the King of Poland, John III Sobieski, after the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

So popular from its origin, the beugel quickly went mainstream in Poland, also becoming a traditional gift for new mothers.  It eventually travelled east to Russia, becoming the street-food,  bubliki.  And traveling west, German bakers added the Poppy seeds.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, North American bagels were almost exclusively produced and sold within Jewish communities.  Then, in 1927, Polish-born baker Harry Lender began the bagel’s mainstream journey when he opened a bagel plant in New Haven, Connecticut.  Another revelation occurred by the 1950s, when Lender’s prepackaged bagels became available in non-kosher grocery stores.   By the 1970s, bagels were being mass-produced by machines, frozen, and shipped to supermarkets across America in polyethylene bags by the half dozen.

Oddly enough, Lender’s never really got a stronghold on the west coast. One year to promote bagels, I was the “St. Patrick’s Day Bagel Girl” all dressed in green to visit morning TV shows.  My main “customer” was the indubitable gourmand, Christine Ferrara, who in the parking lot of ABC-TV happily ate three.  I love her still for this.

TheNew York bagelcontains salt and malt and is boiled in water before baking in a standard oven. The resulting bagel is puffy with a moist crust.  The East Coast style bagel, unique because it incorporates sourdough, is still similar to the New York-style.