Jeff Perera jokes that his bagel chain is the result of a love story.
“I made a bagel for my wife, because she asked me to,” he said.
But learning how to make his wife a great bagel ended up creating a business, Jeff’s Bagel Run, which now has 15 locations and is franchising. Perera expects the unit count will double before the end of the year, and the bagel shops boast an average unit volume of $1.2 million.
It all started during the pandemic shutdown.
Jeff had been laid off from his job and was staying home with the kids while wife Danielle went to work. She’s a former New Yorker and he’s originally from New Jersey, and there just weren’t a lot of good bagel shops near their home in Central Florida.
Jeff would make bagel runs to find one good enough for his wife, often driving a great distance, he said. Finally, his wife said, “Why don’t you learn how to make bagels?”
So he did.
He poured over cookbooks and learned what he could, testing recipe after recipe with his young son helping out. “The first few were terrible,” he said. “But I was having fun.”
Then the pandemic shut everything down. Jeff had nailed bagel making by then, and started selling his bagels online, using social media.
“The pandemic was in full swing, and we got really busy, like 300-400 DMs whenever we dropped a menu,” he said. “We’d sell out. It was quite a phenomenon for a few months.”
That led to selling bagels at farmers' markets. And then, in 2021, the couple found a site for their first brick-and-mortar. Danielle quit her job, and the two made a go of it, with help from a $28,000 Kickstarter.
“We went full bagel,” he said.
Jeff's Bagel Run offers a selection of freshly made bagels, schmears and coffee. | Photo courtesy of Jeff's Bagel Run.
The couple began to build a slow and steady business. Jeff said the two found they worked well together as business partners.
“Danielle and I have a perfect yin and yang as business owners,” he said. “I’m more vision, creative, fly-by-the-seat-of-pants. She’s more operationally focused. She’s on time. She’s the planner.
“She’s the one who makes the Bagel Run run,” he added.
In 2022, the opportunity for a second unit came up. Another bagel baker wanted out and offered his assets. (“Danielle said no. I said yes.” Jeff won.)
So the two split their energies between two units. “It was hard,” said Jeff. “Really, really hard.”
And, just as they were finding their groove, Danielle lost her father and had to step away from the business for a while.
During that time, one of their regular customers kept asking for a meeting. Jeff said he kept putting the “mysterious potential business partner” off. “We just weren’t ready.”
But eventually they met with the mystery man. And it turned out to be Justin Wetherill, the founder of the uBreakiFix tech repair chain, who had built that company to more than 500 units before selling it in 2019. Wetherill was looking for another opportunity.
And he loved bagels.
They struck a deal. Wetherill took on about 50% ownership and they launched JBR Franchise Co., to franchise the bagel brand.
Jeff’s Bagel Run began to grow its corporate stores too, moving from Central Florida to the Orlando area. With Wetherill came infrastructure that Jeff and Danielle previously couldn’t afford: a team, the small family office, a designer and attorney.
The chain was able to get ahead on things like branding, packaging, relationships with distributors and, perhaps most importantly, technology.
The first three hires were software engineers that helped create a proprietary tech stack for the bagel shops. “In 2023, we were the most sophisticated two-store bagel shop,” Jeff joked.
But the team build a trademarked system—dubbed Au-Dough-Mation”—that can now manage front- and back-of-house operations. It’s a point-of-sale system that allows the team to pack orders, and it’s integrated with third-party delivery partners.
And it also has an AI-fueled algorithm that predicts when each store needs to make bagels, so customers can be guaranteed they are getting what’s hot out of the oven.
As Jeff’s Bagel Run grows, that’s a key point of differentiation, said Jeff.
There are millions of bagels available in the world that were baked in the morning, or baked from frozen. But a quality bagel is one that is made from scratch and served hot out of the oven, he contends.
That’s the promise at Jeff’s Bagel Run. The 15 types of bagels are made in-house throughout the day. So are the roughly 15 schmears, which change seasonally. There are a few sweet treats on the menu, and there’s a whole coffee program.
In fact, the beverage program was a bit of a fluke.
During the pandemic when Jeff was baking at home, “coffee hobbyist” Glen Turchin lived three houses down on his block, though the two had never met. One day, Turchin’s wife Jaclyn was out for a walk with her baby, and she saw the bagel business pinned on her Google map.
She reached out.
The families became fast friends. The Turchins later launched a coffeeshop called Otus Coffee, which Jeff’s Bagel Run later acquired and incorporated into the bagel shop business.
Now, with franchising, Jeff’s Bagel Run has units in Georgia, North and South Carolina and Texas. This year, units will open in the Chicagoland area, and Las Vegas.
Bagels are trending these days. Los Angeles has become a hotbed for bagel concepts like Courage Bagels, Hank’s Bagels, the Yeastie Boys food trucks, and more. Out of New York, Popup Bagels has attracted serious investors, and is also franchising.
Even in a world filled with legacy bagel brands, like Einstein Bagel Bros. and Bruegger’s, Jeff sees a world of opportunity for bagels made better, especially in markets he sees as “bagel deserts.”
Jeff’s Bagel Run is trying to be the neighborhood bagel shop that he and his wife once yearned for, said Jeff.
“Could we be the Starbucks of bagels? Is there a world where there’s Jeff’s Bagel Run on corners of New York City?” he said. “Maybe that’s too big a dream. But the goal is to grow and to get bagels into communities that don’t have a good fresh-baked bagel.”