Shelter Island is a ferry ride from everywhere.
That's the appeal of the place and it's also the constraint. Nothing gets here quickly and nothing leaves quickly, which is a strange starting point for a snack company.
The chips began behind the counter of one small bagel shop. They weren't a product. They were what we did with our own bagels, made that morning, sliced and baked again because it seemed like the obvious thing to do with a bagel that good.
Then people started taking them home
First the island. Then across the Hamptons and the North Fork, people who'd come for a dozen bagels and leave with bags of chips too. Then summer ended, and the emails started. People back in the city, back in Connecticut, back in Ohio, asking whether we shipped.
We do now. Eccentric Bagel Chips go out across the country, and our Mini Bagel Chips have become the ones people reorder, small enough to keep in a bag, bold enough that nobody forgets which flavor they liked.
The thing that keeps us honest
Here's what most people don't realize about growing a business like this: our ceiling is set by bagels.
Every chip starts as a real handcrafted bagel from the shop. Not a dough formula, not a factory approximation. That means we can only make as many chips as we can make bagels, and bagels are made by hand, in small batches, by people on Shelter Island.
It would be easy to solve. Plenty of manufacturers would happily produce something chip-shaped and put our name on it. We'd make a great deal more of them and they would not be the same.
So we grow at the speed the bagels allow.
What's next
More retailers, more shelves, more people finding us who've never taken the ferry. That part we're glad about.
But every bag will still start the same way it always has, as a real bagel, rolled by hand, on an island most people need a boat to reach.