In this brief dialogue, the speakers discuss the inherent challenge of bagels being a one‑day product, which leads to rapid quality decay after baking. They contrast the traditional “peak” bagel experience—fresh out of the oven at 100% quality—with the inevitable drop to about 90‑95% within a few hours. To mitigate this, they propose a just‑in‑time, par‑baked approach that delivers a more consistent 96‑99% quality by baking smaller batches on demand. The conversation ends with a real‑world illustration of Boychik Bagels, which uses a continuous‑hot‑bagel system to keep fresh bagels available throughout the day.
My local bagel place, you know, when they're out of sesame bagels at 11 o'clock, they're out.
So you could walk in and it could be a, you know, and that's one of the, that's always been the big challenge with bagels is that a bagel's life is only one day. That's been like, that's the bane of the bagel's existence is that it's a one-day product. But with this, it's like, yeah, you're getting this, you know, almost just-in-time bagel. And I, and for the most part, giving people a better bagel experience because there's the bagel, like, no matter what. So when we have, you know, even the traditional system, you can get a bagel like super fresh out of the oven, like within, within a few minutes. That's like, we'll define that as the 100%, like peak bagel experience. But really the, you know, it has a short half-life. So it starts, it starts to decay. Now it's still excellent, you know, a few hours later. So we're still at like, you know, a 95 or something. But it's, it's, it is, it is starting to decay. Um, but if we have with the parbake, even if we say, okay, well, it's not exactly that same level of perfection, but we could say, okay, instead when that parbake comes out, it's a 99. Uh, so we're never like getting exactly there, but Because we're just baking these smaller things into order, we get to consistently give people like a 96 to 99 experience instead of a 100 to 90. Where they're—
I can just see that happening now in, in Boychik Bagels. You know, the light goes on and we've got hot and fresh bagels all the time.
