Authentic Leadership: Emily Winston on Boichik Bagels and Scaling a Business

“I knew it was technically possible to make the bagel I want to eat,” shares Emily Winston, founder of Boichik Bagels in Berkeley, California. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, Emily cherished the days when her father would bring home H&H bagels after a long day of business in New York. When H&H went out of business in 2011, Emily was devastated and became determined to recreate the bagel that she had longed for. After 5 years of trial and error, Boichik Bagels was born. Emily joins host Mike Horne in conversation to talk about her experience creating her perfect bagel and how she scaled it into an efficient business model.

When Emily first figured out her bagel recipe, she was not thinking about using them to launch a career. Since she had a master’s in mechanical engineering, owning a bagel shop was never anything she had anticipated. After a lot of encouragement from her friends to pursue her passion, Emily began to get involved with the Bay Area’s rich entrepreneurship food scene, taking business classes and doing extensive networking. While she began with pop ups, Emily quickly realized that people would actually pay money for her bagels. This ultimately inspired her to invest in the necessary equipment to make bagel production more efficient and eventually led to the opening of her own shop.

Tune into this week’s episode of the Authentic Change Podcast to learn more about how Emily turned passion for bagels into a full scale and successful business.

• “I never grew up thinking I was going to have a bagel shop. Not in a million years would I have guessed that I’d wind up where I am today.” (2:15-2:21)
• “Eating a lot of bagels was very much part of our standard family tradition. Sunday morning, my dad would go out to the local bagel shop, buy a bag of bagels. We'd have bagels with cream cheese and lox, and the Sunday New York Times would be spread around the kitchen table. It was great.” (2:39-3:02)
• “Fast forward many years I found myself in California and the bagels were not good. So I stopped eating them.” (4:42-4:48)
• “I knew it was possible to make the bagel I’d want to eat. So I just embarked on this new obsessive quest to recreate my bagel for me to eat.” (6:48-6:59)
• “I'm an engineer and I love equipment. I want the equipment to be efficient or else I am not going to do it.” (14:34-14:39)
• “Look, we're gonna do it, and it's gonna be hard. It's okay for something to be hard.” (37:18-37:21)