Apollo Bagels opens inside Industry City

Brooklyn, NY Apollo Bagels, the New York bagel brand known for its naturally fermented, boiled bagels, has opened its newest location inside Industry City, a 35-acre innovation hub. The production flagship produces more than 100,000 bagels a week for all Apollo locations across New York City while also serving Industry City’s own community of more than 8,500 workers and 700 companies. This opening marks Apollo’s ninth location after getting its initial start as a pop-up at a Williamsburg pizza shop two years ago. It’s also the brand’s first full-scale and centralized bakehouse.

In New York City, where locals consume an estimated 111 bagels each per year, and quality is non-negotiable, scaling production without sacrificing craft is essential. Apollo’s early shops baked their own bagels in-house, but demand quickly outpaced the individual stores’ output, leading the brand to centralize production at its Williamsburg location. By the time Apollo expanded to its eighth location, it had again outgrown this production facility, which was turning out 10,000 bagels per day.

After considering locations outside New York City, Apollo chose to stay in Brooklyn, keeping the brand close to the city it feeds and the borough where it started. As a result, it carefully selected Industry City as the home base for its ninth location, with amenities that no traditional storefront could offer, including dedicated fermentation space, expanded cold storage, heavy floor loads and freight access.

Apollo Bagels’ new Industry City location spans 5,075 s/f, divided between a production kitchen and retail space in Industry City’s high-traffic food hall. The production kitchen is now making 15,000 bagels daily for overnight delivery to Apollo Bagels’ locations across the city. The space also includes a window where anyone can watch the full process, from fermentation to finish, connecting Apollo’s community to the craft behind every order. Now, Industry City workers across AI startups, robotics, design studios and more have fresh Apollo bagels without leaving campus.

Industry City has become the proving ground for this commissary model across several different food categories. Li-Lac Chocolates expanded from one location to five across Brooklyn and Manhattan after moving production to the campus. Colson Patisserie’s entire production for its retail locations and wholesale orders for hundreds of bakeries and hotels are out of its Industry City production facility.

“Before Industry City, we were making bagels in spaces that were never designed for the kind of volume we need today,” said Joey Scalabrino, owner at Apollo Bagels. “This space gives us the infrastructure to make bagels the right way at the required scale while also providing room to experiment and grow without cutting corners. Being in Brooklyn, surrounded by other makers who are building something real, feels exactly right for where we are as a brand.”

From Sunset Park, Apollo’s overnight delivery now runs from a single Brooklyn address to all nine locations across the city.

“Apollo Bagels joins a growing roster of food makers at Industry City who both serve the campus and produce for the city at large,” said Jim Somoza, managing director of Industry City. “It’s a model we’ve seen work time and again here, and Apollo is the newest example of what’s possible when a great food brand has the right space and the right neighbors.”