Today we’d like to introduce you to Gabriel KERR.
Hi Gabriel, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
The story of Rosie’s Bagels has a two pronged beginning. My wife Lauren and I have had a dream to open a cafe or restaurant for about a decade. Raising two kids in a world filled with uncertainty around basic life needs like employment, education, and food supply lead to many conversations about what we can do to ensure success for our family in the future, but also applying the things we’ve learned in a way that can be replicated to create success for other families seeking a similar ability to control the parts of our lives that we all should have more say in than our current societal structure encourages. Lauren is an industrial engineer with a decade and a half of experience optimizing the structural flow of businesses from manufacturing startups in Silicon Valley to the largest American company in tech. I am a cook, a comedian, and a small business owner (home remodeling). Our skillsets couldn’t be more different, but out drive is singular: create a pathway for ordinary people like us to build something they own, support and can have pride in. Along side that journey over the last couple of years, I found out a family secret. My dad is Jewish. His parents were both from jewish families that fled Germany in the 1930s, moved to a small town in Ohio and concealed their identities in fear of being found and returned to concentration camps. My grandmother told my father all of this at my grandfathers funeral, and after he spent some time processing his new reality, going to visit family in Israel he didn’t know he had, and learning more about his family tree, he told me. In the midst of discovering my jewish heritage, and my wife spending her non-existent free time learning how to make basically everything from homemade butter and bread, to growing all of our own produce, the space where it all comes together hit us… Bagels!
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Oh my, where do I begin? I decided to quit doing the thing that actually made money and start doing comedy full time 3 months before the covid pandemic became widespread. Then we had our second child the day the world shut down. And a week later the small company my wife was working for closed permanently. Timing is everything! We were in the middle of northern California during the biggest uptick in housing costs in our lifetime, with no real source of income. So, we packed up and moved to a place I had lived in my youth. Austin, Tx! Except, we couldn’t afford to move here yet, so we actually moved to Belton, Tx and spent the next three years driving an hour and a half each way, Lauren to a new 9-5 gig in downtown Austin, and me to open mics, small bar shows, and working till 3 am every night as a door guy at Vulcan Gas Company. It was a harrowing few years of deciding how badly we really wanted to be a part of this community, barely staying afloat, seeing each other for an hour or so every night between her coming home from work and me heading to it. But we were able to save up enough money to buy a house in the city in 2024, built an amazing community for us and our girls, and found some wonderful local markets to begin selling our bagels and bagel dogs till we have the capital to buy a food truck and rent out a more permanent location.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Rosie’s Bagels?
The name kinda says it all! We do bagels, bagel dogs, and breakfast bagel sandwiches. We will add coffee and some other adjacent items when we open the food truck location. But the vision is bigger. We’re building a network of small restaurant/ food truck/ cart owners that will eventually have the same collective buying power, and influence to be able to bring operating costs down to a similar level as large chain brands, but with individual owners and they families reaping the benefits, instead of large corporate ownership groups, management chains, and boards of billionaire directors making the decisions with no regard for the people working or the quality of the product being created, Not just better cost, better supply. We want all of the owners in our collective to be able to make all of the wonderful things they do, without having to make quality ingredient decisions based on profit margins. Improving the national food supply will take efforts from all parts of that supply from the farm to the table.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
I grew up in the city (Chicago, Atlanta, Austin) but my parents both came from rural families, and they made an intentional effort to make sure their kids knew that world too. We used to go to my dad’s family farm in Sugar Creek, Ohio and help harvest the crops. We would go to apple orchards and strawberry fields in Ellijay, Ga and pick fresh fruit and gourds, and always had a garden with fresh herbs growing at home. That connection to the earth, the true source of sustenance for healthy human beings has stayed with me my whole life.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rosiesbagels.com
- Instagram: @rosiesbagels.atx
