About Bupkes Bakery

Where did the bagel drive come from? Funny you should ask.

The public has enjoyed Bupkes baked goods for generations — rye breads, rolls, bagels, strudel, rugelah, and particularly our special buttery hamentashen. Poppy seed, apricot, and prune.

Baking is what the Bupkes family does. Even in the old country. In fact, Bupkes have been baking in Bialystok for as long as the town has kept records! According to legend, it was a Bupkes who suggested let’s skip the leavening just this once and get our tuchuses out of Egypt already. Bupkeses are not dawdlers!

Jacob Bupkes came to America in 1904 with little more than a notebook of treasured family recipes. After working briefly in the pickle trade, Jacob opened his first bakery in 1906. He and Sarah, above, raised seven children along with the dough.

While time stood still at Bupkes Bakery, the world changed. People don’t care about quality and flavor anymore. The breads and rolls they sell in stores today? Feh. That you call a crust? That drek is full of chemicals. It isn’t fit for feeding to birds. Still, some people buy it.

At Bupkes, we still do things the time-honored, old-fashioned way. This is why our customers love our baked goods. Our relationships with customers last for years, generation after generation.

To this day, Bupkeses work at the bakery. Including my wife’s nephew Moshe, who is something of a shmeggegie but is a whiz with the electronic gadgets. Always texting and surfing the internets! I tell him, enough with the cell phone when working. Does he listen? Of course not.

Nu, one day at the bakery Moshe can’t find his cell phone. He looked everywhere, but it was gone. Vanished! So Moshe is upset, and I’m busy and this I need loch in kop. What should happen but a loaf of marble rye began to ring!

That was it! An electronic bagel! This was an opportunity that we have to answer. The bagel drive is our way of bringing an old-world baking tradition into the 21st Century, a deliciously appealing but inedible sandwich of the old and the new.

So now you know Bupkes!


Irv Bupkes