These Minneapolis-made, New York-style bagels have become an instant sensation

A car parked outside a south Minneapolis commercial kitchen has a pink diamond-shaped sticker attached to its rear bumper. While on other cars that might indicate an infant in the back, this one contains small, round and pudgy cargo of a different sort. The sign says: "Bagels on Board."

For Megan Berray-Larsen, the founder of farmers market and Instagram sensation Mogi Bagel, her crisp-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside and heavily topped creations are just as precious to her as one's offspring.

"People ask, 'Are you going to have kids?' " said Berray-Larsen, 32. "I say, 'I already had my kid. It's bagels.' "

The birth of her business was an unexpected blessing. Only a little more than six months since the launch of Mogi Bagel, Berray-Larsen has been riding a wave of rapid success, fueled in part by social media virality and adorable branding.

Berray-Larsen, of Richfield, had a steady career as a graphic designer at an ad agency. Then one day, as she was eating a bagel, she had the idea to make her own. "It was as if the path was just chosen for me," she said. "I couldn't drop the idea."

Since December 2022, she has perfected her recipe, moved from her home kitchen to a professional one at Kitchen Space, quit her day job, entered three farmers markets, and increased her capacity from 42 dozen to 150 dozen per week. She no longer goes to the gym because making bagels by hand is enough of a workout. And she doesn't have time to walk her dog anymore; now her husband does it.

On market days, she wakes up at midnight to start boiling and baking nine flavors of bagels, which range from sesame to honey rosemary, and preparing cream cheese. By the next morning, her entire stock is usually sold out in less than two hours.

"I just keep telling myself that it's only temporary," she said. "Hopefully in the future I can hire employees and I can take a little bit of a step back. Right now I'm grinding, and I'm OK with that."

Filling a bagel void

The daughter of a culinary instructor, Berray-Larsen had always been interested in building a career in food. "But it just seemed like working my way up in a restaurant would be really hard, and it didn't seem like it was the right thing for me," she said. "So this kind of ended up being perfect. It's one thing I can focus on making as good as I can."

A former food blogger, she had been struck by how quickly cottage food businesses gained traction on social media. Marty's Deli, which started as a pop-up sandwich sale advertised on Instagram and now has its own shop in northeast Minneapolis, was an early inspiration.

"In my experience there are two especially critical components to getting a small food business off the ground. The first is to be scrappy, hardworking and creative. The second is having the support of 'the village.' Both things Megan has in multitudes," said Martha Polacek, the founder of Marty's Deli.

Berray-Larsen tinkered with a recipe for New York-style bagels she found online, and as she got deeper into research about the gluten content of flour and the art of hand-rolling (vs. poking a hole in the middle), she landed on a formula that the Twin Cities was apparently craving.

Before Travis Brew of Minneapolis found Mogi Bagel, "I feel like I haven't had a lot of bagel experiences in the Twin Cities that were just like, OK, this is really good," he said. Now, he's a regular customer.

Berray-Larsen first launched Mogi (rhymes with yogi, it's a nickname Megan's sisters bestowed on her) on Instagram, selling the bagels via private message, taking payment over Venmo, and delivering them herself around the metro. Though the bagels were homemade, she had a professional logo from the beginning — one she designed using her years of branding expertise. She thinks the look — lowercase red letters on a sky blue background — helped get the business off the ground.

Also contributing to her quick rise was an early post from top local chef Yia Vang. A mutual friend had posted about Berray-Larsen's cacio e pepe-flavored bagels, and when Vang saw it, he was "blown away." He ordered them to make breakfast sandwiches and started posting about them, spreading the word to his 17,000 Instagram followers. Many of Mogi Bagel's fans cite Vang's post as the first time they heard about the business.

"We really have a huge heart for a small food startup because we know what it's like to start from a small operation," Vang said.

Besides the early buzz, Berray-Larsen believes some of her success comes simply from supplying the Twin Cities, something of a bagel desert, with a new option for chewy, gluten-y breakfast bread. "Maybe because it's so hard to make a really good bagel," she said. "I was like, this is an untapped market."

Bigger bagel dreams

The Twin Cities might not have a bagel shop on every corner, but in recent years there has been something of a bagel renaissance as more bakers offer their unique spins on a tried-and-true product. Asa's Bakery makes a naturally leavened sourdough bagel; Baker's Field Flour & Bread makes theirs from stone-milled whole grain. Café Cerés entered the field with a twisty Turkish-style bagel. And ElMar's New York Pizza has a filtration system that mimics the compounds in New York water for their bagel recipe.

Still, no one would call Minneapolis a bagel town, and ex-East Coasters are especially hungry for new versions of the bagels they grew up with.

Barbara McLaughlin Lasser, of Inver Grove Heights, has probably tried every bakery in the Twin Cities in search of a bagel that her husband, a born-and-bred Brooklynite, would love. Since she found Mogi Bagel, she said his cravings have been satisfied.

"One of our kids went to New York City to visit a relative and said, 'Do you want me to bring back any bagels?' And we said no," McLaughlin Lasser said. After decades of working their way through the Twin Cities' middling bagel scene, Mogi finally had hit the spot.

Brew fell for "everything about it, the texture, the flavor," he said. "And I think one of the allures of it immediately was it's almost like a little secret. It was fun to get in on it really early on."

Even those who are first learning about Mogi Bagel via farmers markets can say they jumped on the Mogi Bagel bandwagon in its infancy. In between rolling bagels in a hot kitchen, Berray-Larsen is taking stock of her success and allowing herself to dream bigger.

She's already upgrading her oven to a double-decker, which should shrink the number of hours she needs to spend overnight in the kitchen. She wants to hire people to work with her; right now, her mother and sisters volunteer.

"Everyone supports her," said Berray-Larsen's mother, Dina Berray, who is often cutting and weighing dough alongside Berray-Larsen. "She's just put all of her passion to use and she took a huge step here and is rocking it."

When the farmers market season ends, she may go wholesale. One day, she'd love to open her own bagel shop. But "I try to take baby steps, one little thing at a time," she said. "I'm just going to see where the ride takes me."

For now, she'll keep nurturing her little creations as they make their way out into the world, fully baked.

"Good morning, babies," she says to a tray of risen rings, just before she drops them into a vat of malt-sweetened boiling water. "Let's get ready for your bath."

Pickup: Pre-order bagels ($2 each), cream cheese ($6) and merch at mogibagel.com starting at noon on Sundays to pick up at Kitchen Space (5750 Lyndale Av. S., Mpls.) on Tuesdays.

Thursday market: Weekly 3 to 7 p.m. Centennial Lakes Farmers Market (7499 France Av. S., Edina).

Saturday markets: Mogi Bagel alternates between the Northeast Farmers Market and the Fulton Farmers Market each Saturday. July 1: 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Fulton (4901 Chowen Av. S., Mpls.), July 8: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Northeast (639 NE. 2nd St., Mpls).

More info: Keep tabs on Mogi Bagel at mogibagel.com and @mogi_bagel on Instagram.