Complex Numbers

Bite Me

Here's an article about a thing I don't think I've ever tried.

How Bagel Bites Took a (Tiny) Bite Out of Snacking History  
What happens when a simple, innovative idea meets two hardworking families who will do anything to follow their dreams? A miniature, delicious pizza-bagel, of course

I don't know why I've never tried it. I love pizza, and of course bagels are part of my culture. I think, probably, I always assumed that they aren't real bagels (which they're not) or real pizza (which they're not), so I didn't want to be turned off from either or both by consuming this horrid abomination.

I have no problem eating pizza toppings on naan, though.

“You won’t believe this,” Stanley Garczynski, the co-creator of Bagel Bites, says with a pause, “but I hate pizza.”

I have a cousin who worked at a pizza place in high school. He couldn't eat the stuff for years.

Still, the article may be a puff piece (that's a joke, as bagels are anything but puffy), but it's still an interesting look at the business.

It all started sometime around 1982, when 30-year-old Garczynski moved to Fort Myers, Florida in search of a fresh start. Along with that, he needed a new tennis partner, which is how he met Mosher, a caterer at the time. The two became fast friends, and they and their respective girlfriends would get together often to party, drink and shoot the breeze about everything from their dreams for the future to humankind’s near-universal love for pizza. It was during these casual get-togethers a simple, yet innovative idea was born, one that would not only make Garczynski a millionaire, but change American snacking habits forever.

Now, that's a bit of a stretch. One of the reasons I've never tried bagel bites is simply that no one I know has ever produced them at a party I was at. To be fair, though, few people ever invite me to parties.

In 1982, I had been a teacher for seven years in Londonderry, New Hampshire. I loved teaching and I loved the kids, but there was no money in it. I was getting restless living in New Hampshire, so I moved to Florida and began working in marketing and sales.

I hate that "marketing and sales" pays better than teaching. What people earn is supposed to be proportional to their value to society. Hey! Stop laughing!

So we got to talking about coming up with some kind of hors d’oeuvre or appetizer that would be fun for kids — something we could put pizza toppings on, like toast, bread or English muffins. Around this time, bagels had become very popular. In the past, they’d mostly been big in Jewish areas of New York City, but Lender’s Bagels out of Hartford, Connecticut was making them more common everywhere.

I'm sure if the only bagels you ever eat are Lender's, you have a warped idea of what those toroidal carbohydrate modules are. Go to New York. Eat a real bagel. You'll never eat Lender's again.

One of the early challenges was that we had to figure out where to get our ingredients. We already decided on the Lender’s mini-bagels, and for the cheese, we got Sargento. For the sauce, we used Heinz, who would end up buying Bagel Bites some years later.

Still, if you're going for mass-production, you could do worse than those suppliers.

People would see our booth and say, “Bagel Bites? What is a Bagel Bite?” and then see these little pizzas. They’d pick them up, turn them over and see that dimple. “Oh, they’re bagels!” they’d say. “Wow! Pizza on a bagel!” We’d serve thousands of them.

Bagels shouldn't have dimples. Bagels should have holes. The holes in a real bagel would make it somewhat awkward to put pizza toppings on them. More edges for shit to fall off of.

So yeah, a pretty standard success story, and a one-sided one at that. It often amazes me how things that, by all rights, should not exist become popular and profitable. History is littered with them. Chicken wings, for example. Bottled water. I mean, whoever first came up with the idea: "Hey, you know what the world needs? We take the parts of the chicken that usually become dog food, and we market them as sports-watching snacks."

This is why I'd never be a successful businessman. I'd be too focused on what should be to try to sell something that should never be.