POPUP BAGELS IS WORTH $300 MILLION AND MAKES YOU BUY THREE BAGELS TO GET ONE

Walk into the PopUp Bagels at 1501 Broadway in Times Square and ask for one plain bagel, and you'll walk out with three. The smallest thing on the menu is a bag of three hot, whole bagels and an 8-ounce tub of cream cheese or butter, $13 when Tribeca Citizen wrote up the Greenwich Street shop in February, and Time Out's listing still starts the menu at $13. Nobody slices them. There are no seats. The Times Square shop opened on October 16. It's one of nine PopUps open in the five boroughs, with a tenth marked coming soon in Bayside. Here's why a bagel chain in the city that made the bagel won't sell you one, who's paying for it to grow, and what the same bag costs at a Queens counter.

The menu is short on purpose. Five bagels: plain, everything, poppy, salt, sesame. Plain or scallion cream cheese, salted butter, brown sugar cinnamon butter, and a weekly special; in early November the page listed a chocolate chip pumpkin cream cheese and a maple butter. Smoked salmon by the four or eight ounces. Juice, iced tea, coffee. That's it. The bagels are sold by the bag, the menu says, in four sizes: three with a tub, six with a tub, a dozen with two tubs, 30 with five. Pre-orders are dozens only. There is no size smaller than three.

Tribeca Citizen laid out the combos in February: three or six bagels with one 8-ounce schmear, or a dozen with two, and three plus a tub for $13. When the Upper West Side shop opened on Columbus Avenue, the Forward put the same three-bagel minimum at $12. The floor has gone up a dollar.

The way you're meant to eat it has a name. PopUp calls it Grip, Rip & Dip: you hold the bagel, tear it open and drag it through the tub. No knife, no toaster, no sandwich. The shops are small, usually 1,000 to 1,200 square feet by Entrepreneur's count, and built with nowhere to sit. "Our shops don't even have seats," the CEO, Tory Bartlett, told the magazine.

Adam Goldberg, who founded PopUp, has explained the rule himself. Selling bagels one at a time would change how they're baked, he told the Forward, because they wouldn't be coming out of the oven fresh; the 8-ounce tub, he said, is why three is the right minimum. He feels the same about the knife. Slicing and sandwich-making, he said, "eliminates the beauty of a hot, fresh bagel."

That's the founder's case, and part of it holds up. A bagel is best in its first minutes out of the oven, and anyone who has eaten one hot on a cold sidewalk knows it.

The business case sits right next to it. QSR Magazine reported this spring that PopUp's average transaction runs north of $24. A shop that never sells a single bagel never rings up a $2 sale, or a $4 one with cream cheese. Every customer leaves with at least $13 of bread and dairy, and the average customer with nearly twice that.

The rest of the model follows from one product. Five kinds of bagel, a handful of spreads, a few drinks. No slicer, no grill, no sandwich station, no dining room to wipe down. Bartlett told Entrepreneur last year that some high-volume shops gross $5 million a year with 12 employees, and that the brand was designed to deliver margins above 20 percent. There's nothing to make to order beyond picking flavors.

PopUp started in 2020 in Westport, Connecticut. Goldberg was baking at home during the pandemic and selling bagels from his backyard to friends and neighbors, Entrepreneur reported. The attention it got online brought in private money, including from celebrities, and a permanent Westport shop came before the New York area. The company's first city shop was in Greenwich Village.

Franchising started in late 2023. Bartlett, who had been chief brand officer at Moe's and Schlotzsky's, arrived in 2024, recruited by Stripes, the investment firm Entrepreneur called PopUp's majority investor. Funding rounds in October 2025 valued the company at about $60 million and gave Stripes control, Hedgeweek reported, citing earlier reports, and QSR also dates Stripes' majority to October. By the summer of 2025 PopUp had signed deals for 300 future shops with fewer than 15 franchisees, according to Entrepreneur and QSR.

Then came Tiger Global, Chase Coleman's investment firm. Bloomberg reported on April 10 that Tiger had agreed to invest at a valuation of about $300 million, roughly five times what the company was worth five months earlier, in a deal that closed in late March. PopUp said only that Stripes was still its largest investor. How much Tiger put in wasn't disclosed. PopUp had about 30 shops then, and QSR put the near-term target at 100 by the end of 2027. Today its own directory lists more than 50 locations in at least 20 states and Washington, D.C., some of them marked coming soon.

Here's the city map from PopUp's live directory. In Manhattan: Times Square; 7 Penn Plaza at 370 Seventh Avenue; East 57th Street; Thompson Street; Tribeca on Greenwich Street; Third Avenue on the Upper East Side; East 16th Street at Union Square; and Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side. In Brooklyn, one shop, on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg. In Queens, Bay Terrace in Bayside, on Bell Boulevard, is listed as coming soon. Nothing yet in the Bronx or on Staten Island. Penn Plaza and Times Square stay open into the evening; most of the others close at 4 PM.

On Long Island, Roslyn came first, in November 2024, on Old Northern Boulevard, with lines out the door from the first week, Greater Long Island reported. Garden City on Old Country Road and Westhampton Beach on Main Street are open now. Huntington Station, on Walt Whitman Road, is marked coming soon, and a coming-soon sign went up in a Plainview shopping center in September, LongIsland.com reported, with no opening date.

Times Square is the statement piece. The shop opened at 7 AM on October 16 with a DJ and merch for the first people in line, and Goldberg called it "pretty surreal" in the company's announcement. It also sells two schmears you can only get there, one of them made with Katz's Delicatessen.

Do the arithmetic. Thirteen dollars over three bagels is $4.33 a bagel with the cream cheese folded in, and you've bought three whether you wanted three or not. If you wanted one, the other two are the price of admission.

Now price the same order at a New York counter. Utopia Bagels in Whitestone, Queens, lists a plain bagel at $2 on its own menu and a half pound of plain cream cheese, the same 8 ounces as PopUp's tub, at $6. Three bagels and the tub come to $12, a dollar under PopUp. And Utopia will sell you one: $2 plain, $3.50 with butter, $4.50 with cream cheese.

A New Yorker who wants three bagels and a tub pays about the same at either place. The gap is in the choice. The counter sells one bagel to the person who wants one bagel. PopUp sells a bag to everyone, and every customer becomes a three-bagel customer.

That's what the $300 million is buying into. A business with no singles, no sandwiches and no seats runs an average check over $24 and a menu a franchisee can copy anywhere from Times Square to Westhampton Beach. It's a good business, and the investors know it. It's also built on dropping the one thing a New York bagel shop has always done, which is hand you one for a couple of dollars.

A single bagel is the smallest sale a New York counter makes, and PopUp built a $300 million company on refusing it.

SOURCING