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The Superbowl may be over, but the Bagel Bowl is on its way. Sort of.
After Jericho-based Nathan’s Famous turned its hot dog eating contest into a national tradition, making headlines and helping market its flagship product, a well- known entrepreneur has launched a national bagel eating contest on Long Island.
Competitors are slated to battle for $500 and the title of “bagel eating champion” at the national bagel eating contest, organized by the National Bagel Association, this Sunday, Feb. 12, from 1-2 p.m.
Contestants will vie to see who can eat the most bagels ineight minutes at Bagel Boss locations at 1352 Peninsula Blvd.in Hewlett and 432 S. Oyster Bay Rd., in Hicksville.
The showdown in the suburbs (as Don King might dub it) will be held a few days after National Bagel Day, which is on Feb. 9, when some bagel stores offer special deals.
For more information and to compete at the event, where former competitive eater Don Moses Lerman will be a guest judge, clickhere.
Whether the contest captures imaginations along the lines of Nathan’s contest remains to be seen. But it is among the first initiatives of the newly formed National Bagel Association, whichAndrew Hazen created last year.
Hazen is the CEO of Angel Dough Ventures, a holding company in Westbury, CEO of Launchpad Long Island and CEO of the Bagel of the Month Club.
He created the association, which has members in New York, New Jersey and California, and bought the domain name for bagels.org, the official website of the group.
“A couple of years ago, I realized that every industry has a trade association,” Hazen said. “The restaurant industry has the National Restaurant Association. The pizza industry has a trade association. But there was no national bagel association for 20,000 bagel stores nationwide.”
He created the association which last year organized its first bagel eating contest, adding bagels to a long list of foods such as chicken wings, apple pie and donuts where competitors vie with each other based on speed.
“You name it,” Hazen said of competitive eating contests. “That’s why I started the bagel contest. There was a contest for almost everything, but not for bagels.”
The association, which includes a few dozen members, is seeking to become a business group for the bagel industry, including bagel store owners, bakers and those who love the food.
“The goal is to help bagel store owners do better marketing,” Hazen said. “We want to promote the consumption of bagels and help bagel store owners get more traffic into their bagel stores.”
Although the association’s membership is still small, it includes a company in New Jersey that produces a few million bagels annually as well as firms such as Bagel Boss, in the business for many decades, Hazen said.
“They’ve got their family recipes and experience from being in the industry,” Hazen said. “You also have some people who retired and sold their business. They open a bagel store when they used to be an accountant or in marketing.”
Hazen hopes that his trade group can become the voice of the industry and provide networking and advice to members.
Bagel Boss CEO Adam Rosner serves on the board of the group where Irv Brum, a partner at Ruskin Moscou Faltischek, is general counsel.
Members can advise each other on how to make products, such as black and white cookies and gluten free bagels or suggest the going rate for bakers and counter people.
“It’s a comfort food. Every day people get bagels for breakfast, lunch,” Hazen said, adding that it’s also a competitive industry. “I think it’s a tough business .People may get into it without knowing how to operate.”
He believes the industry is doing well with some new ideas creating niches, such as Bantam Bagels, which makes a typeof bagel bite that resembles a Munchkin. He said it has grown from $200,000 to as much as $15 million in sales.
Hazen said a bially manufacturing company is moving from Brooklyn to Oceanside, where it is taking a 30,000-square-foot space.
Meanwhile, Hazen is running the Bagel of the Month Club, a monthly subscription service that mails New York bagels to around 1,000 members across the nation.
“It’s a lot of gift giving, parents sending to their kids in college, ex-New Yorkers who moved out of New York,” Hazen said of the service that ships once a month, for one month, three months or a year as well as through various other arrangements.
If you haven’t heard of National Bagel Day, the association is also trying to change that. And Nationalbagelday.com is seeking to educate people as to the history of what some people view as their favorite food.
According to the website, there are varying stories about the provenance of the bagel. But the site points to one explanation tracing the bagel back to 1610 in Krakow, Poland,where bagels were given as a gift to women in childbirth.
“Some historians credit a Viennese baker for creating the bagel to commemorate the victory of the Polish King Jan III Sobieski over the Turks in 1683,” according to the site. “The bread was formed into the shape of stirrup, because the liberated Austrians had clung to the king’s stirrups as he rode by.”
In the 16th century and first half of the 17th century, according to the site, the “bajgiel” became a staple of the Polish diet before catching on elsewhere.
By the mid-19-century, bagels were being sold in London, where they were displayed in the windows of bakeries on vertical wooden dowels, up to a meter in length, on racks.
What’s next for the National Bagel Association? A bagel convention may be around the corner, especially with so many other gatherings already in place for other groups.
“We’re going to have a bagel conference,” Hazen said. “We’ll probably call it Bagelcon.”
