WINTER PARK, Fla. – Jeff’s Bagel Run is hitting the ground running with its expansion plans, announcing Thursday it plans to open two new Central Florida locations, with the goal of opening four to six new stores by the end of the year.
On Thursday, the company announced it would be opening locations in Winter Park and Celebration.
The Winter Park store is set to open at 1336 N. Orange Ave., next door to Black Bean Deli, according to a news release.
The Celebration location will open in Unicorp’s new Celebration Pointe Shopping Center.
No opening dates have been announced for these locations.
This announcement comes after the company announced another new location in the O-Town West shopping area near Orange County’s tourist district.
Currently, Jeff’s Bagel Run has two locations open; its original location in Ocoee — which opened in 2021 — and a spot in Orlando’s College Park neighborhood, which opened in 2022.
The company’s new, rapid expansion comes after it partnered with 1337 Capital which is run by Justin Wetherill, the co-founder of the uBreakiFix chain of mobile device repair shops. The partnership includes plans to expand the small chain nationwide, according to a news release.
The chain of bagel shops is run by Jeff and Danielle Perera.
Jeff’s Bagel Run first began when Jeff Perera found himself out of work in 2019. His wife had been a stay-at-home mom for a few years at this point and had been planning to rejoin the workforce, allowing Jeff Perera to take over the stay-at-home parenting duties.
“We were both home — we had that overlap, and neither of us were working,” Jeff Perera said on the Florida Foodie podcast. “And we were driving to Winter Park, 45 minutes to get bagels. And (I said), ‘This is silly — Like, there’s no bagel shop on our side of town.’ So she said, ‘Why don’t you make me one?’”
Within a few months of perfecting his bagel recipe, Jeff Perera was looking to sell his boiled and baked rings online. The bagel sales saw some early success, but once the pandemic hit, the pair started looking at the business in a different way.
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The couple started selling more bagels through their social media page and were quickly overwhelmed by the amount of business they were receiving.
“We’d get, you know, 200 to 300 messages all at the same time (asking for bagels),” Jeff Perera said.
“It worked in the beginning, and then it just grew too fast,” Danielle Perera said.
The pair eventually built a website to handle the influx of orders and eventually opened their Ocoee store in 2021.
Check out the Florida Foodie podcast. You can find every episode in the media player below: