Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Bagel Automation: California Rolling Machines vs New York!

17 Aug 2026 · 2 min

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1:51

The speaker explains how a retail‑size bagel‑forming machine works and its impact on production. Dough is loaded into a hopper, measured, flattened, and rolled into a snake‑like shape that passes around a mandrel, joining the ends to form a bagel which exits at roughly one per second. After each bagel is produced, an employee manually lifts it onto a board, repeats this for dozens of bagels, then transfers the boards to racks and adds cornmeal. While the machine automates the dough‑shaping step, the post‑production handling remains labor‑intensive. The speaker highlights that in California there is a shortage of skilled bagel rollers and many workers suffer from carpal tunnel and wrist issues, making manual rolling undesirable. In contrast, New York has abundant skilled rollers, so automation is less critical there. The overall message is that basic automation of the rolling process saves significant labor effort, especially in regions like California where skilled labor is scarce and repetitive strain injuries are common.

Chapters

We take the dough, put it in the hopper here, and it would— it kind of measures out a chunk of dough, flattens it out. It replicates hand rolling. It rolls it out like a snake and then goes through this— Mm-hmm. Around— it gets shoved around a mandrel, so the ends get shoved together and then it pops out. But this retail-size machine, it comes out, it's like one a second. It goes like chunk, chunk, chunk. And we have to have an employee picking up each bagel at the end of the line. They pick it up, they put it on a board. They pick up the bagel, put it on a board. And we do this 24 times. And then we take the board and we put it on the rack. We take another board, we sprinkle it with cornmeal, pick the bagels. And, you know, meanwhile there's been a little backlog. It's kind of the I Love Lucy in the candy factory scenario, but no one's inhaling the raw dough. Sometimes it hits the floor instead, but we're just It's just this chunk, chunk, chunk, and every bagel is getting picked up and put on the board. And you know, it's a pretty tedious affair, but that's, that was, that's the retail size automation. That started with just the very basic exist, like very standard, just this machine. You know, we put the dough in, it pops out the bagels, but it's, yeah, it's, it's definitely saves a ton. It's automated compared to hand rolling, which is Definitely a lot of work. And it's one thing to do it, have someone do it in New York where there's tons of skilled bagel rollers around. But yeah, we don't really have that in California. It's this tough thing and a ton of people, most people wind up with carpal tunnel problems or other, you know, kind of just nerve or wrist problems. So it's not fun. And I'm like, let's, let's let machinery do that. But yeah, so I started with, that was, that was the extent of the automation.