Jeff Perera began Jeff’s Bagel Run as a labor of love, making New York-style bagels in his home kitchen to treat his wife Danielle when she returned home from work. On his journey to create the perfect bagel, COVID hit. During the pandemic, stay-at-home dad Jeff saw an opportunity to fill the breakfast gap, and initiated the “run” part of the brand’s name, going door-to-door delivering freshly baked bagels to friends and family.
The scratch-made bagels were so well-loved in the community that Perera had to begin doing “drops” on Facebook. When the virtual love increased, they began selling at local farmers’ markets. In June 2021, the first location opened in Ocoee, Florida, with a second in August 2022 in College Park, Florida, both suburbs of Orlando.
Now at 15 units in 2025, Jeff’s Bagel Run president Justin Wetherill says, “The bagel industry, as a new entrant and maybe from an outsider’s perspective, has really become more about what you can put on a bagel than on the bagel itself. Can you make it a bacon, egg, and cheese? Can you make it lunch? For us, the focus is the bagel as an actual product.”
Jeff’s Bagel Run prides itself on its process. With dough mixed in-house and bagels proofed and rolled in-store (then boiled, baked, and topped), the brand is one of the few concepts that sells bagels made within its own four walls.
Also on the menu is a variety of cream cheeses, including cake batter, roasted jalapeno, and banana pudding, and a sweet cinnamon-honey and savory herby-garlic whipped butter spread option. There is also a full coffee menu, with banana bread- and pumpkin spice-swirled lattes in addition to a purple gradient lavender lemonade.
While he was building his bagel business, Wetherill says Perera’s neighbor was growing a coffee concept down the street, called Otus Coffee. Jeff’s Bagel Run acquired Otus last year, and uses its coffee in stores.
Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient Wetherill founded uBreakiFix at age 21 in 2009 as a University of Central Florida student. Although he is no longer actively working with the tech brand, Wetherill, also a Ferrari Challenge driver, jumped into the QSR scene in 2021.
Wetherill says that in 2023, “I had a small family office, I was working with a small group of people, kind of from the uBreakiFix era, I was racing cars and playing video games, honestly. Min Cho [uBreakiFix General Counsel] brought bagels into the office one Friday and I thought, ‘Oh, these are good.’”
Cho brought the same bagels in on the next Friday, and upon Wetherill again complimenting them, Cho offered to make an introduction between Wetherill and the bagel bakery’s owners, the Pereras. Months later, Wetherill, looking to grow a brand, sat down to chat with Jeff’s Bagel Run, which at the time had only two units. A week later, Wetherill made bagels with them in the store. After having a bagel straight out of the oven for the first time, Wetherill’s appreciation for the product landed him the role as the bagel brand’s first president.
On the offerings at Jeff’s Bagel Run, Wetherill jokes, “it’s barely food.” Serving bagels, cream cheese, and coffee, the brand offers no trendy layered sandwiches or funky fusion cuisine. For Wetherill, he says the limited menu and scalable business model seemed like a great entry into the QSR space, coming from the tech scene.
“Bagels was never where I thought I’d end up, coming out of engineering school. I blame a good portion of that on Justin,” says Jeff’s Bagel Run’s VP of technology Aaron LeClair, who worked with Wetherill at uBreakiFix. After working at large-scale high-tech enterprises and various start-ups, LeClair was looking for a change. One day, he says, “[Wetherill] called me and said, ‘Hey man, have you ever had these bagels?’”
With bagels good enough to pull in two heavily experienced technology buffs in just one oven-fresh bite, Jeff’s Bagel Run is experiencing major growth, with plans to open more than 100 stores over the coming year.
“There were a lot of things that Jeff and Danielle did in the store every day that made the store special, made the customers feel like they were part of something special, and it really contributed to the experience we were trying to create,” Wetherill says. “So, I saw a great opportunity to systematize some of the things that they were doing, and to ensure that it was scalable.”
When he joined the brand, Wetherill saw a huge chance for both expansion and advancement. “My natural inkling is to use technology to drive consistency in areas that have more opportunity for failure,” he says. “For example, we have to roll tomorrow’s bagels today. If we don’t roll enough bagels today for tomorrow, because they have to be proofed in the refrigerator overnight, then we sell out the next day. So, using technology to forecast how much to make for future days rather than just leaving it up to the whims of the store owner or overbaking or not being baked on demand, all of these things are some of the high-level opportunities I saw when I first got involved to streamline and scale some of these operations and to make Jeff’s special.”
Shortly after, LeClair joined the brand and got to work on creating a completely integrated system with a distinct POS component, full kitchen display system (KDS), baking management system, and a customer-facing app. After a year of work, the Au-dough-mation system, built internally with help from artificial intelligence software, is already being used in all current stores, after being put in “on day one after it looked good in testing.”
“We’ve never opened a Jeff’s without it,” says LeClair. Save for the Perera’s original two units, every new store has been assisted by the system as the brand grows.
In a typical QSR, each station (kitchen, checkout, etc.) sees its individual POV on the screen, directing sales or upcoming orders, but does not show the digital interfaces from the employees doing different operations. By unifying these systems, LeClair says the front of house can have visibility over back of house and vice versa, allowing the cashier to see which bagel trays have just been pulled out of the oven or which bagels have been most recently put out on the front display shelf (without even having to look for any telltale rising steam).
“You look at a lot of standard bakeries, and they pre-bake really early in the morning, fill all the racks, and then maybe there’s an incremental bake in the mid-morning to refresh as they’re selling out,” says LeClair. “If you come in outside of those two windows, you’re going to get something that’s increasingly stale. What our system does is it predicts sales and volume for each day for each unique store and for each flavor of bagel. Within that day’s period, we predict when that bagel is gonna be needed, and we then tell the bakers when to bake throughout the day.”
Distilled for the non-techies, Jeff’s Au-dough-mation allows bakers to follow the order delivered to them via the program, baking consistently throughout the day to reflect the busiest hours for individual stores.
When an order comes in through a channel (mobile app, in-store, or a third-party delivery like Uber or Doordash), the barista station’s consolidated system has the standard printed order ticket for drinks on the roster to be made. The recipes are also present on the digital ticket, for baristas-in-training to receive instructions on how to make a certain drink or to guide experienced employees through LTOs.
The new system is also helpful for indecisive guests. “It gives [the cashier] more tools to really engage the customer with the brand, in a really easy-to-do way, without having to yell over their shoulder or not be engaged,” says LeClair.
For Jeff’s customer experience app, which launched last year, guests can order, join loyalty, earn points, and redeem free items. The individual loyalty program was launched in Q1 of 2025. “The mobile orders from our own app already make up 26 percent of total orders, which is pretty significant for a brand of our size,” says Catriona Harris, VP of Marketing.
Most stores are in suburban locations, focused around trade areas and routes on the way to work. The average store has about eight seats, and most of Jeff’s service is grab-and-go, bringing dozens to family, friends, or workplaces.
Jeff’s Bagel Run is currently at 15 locations across Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Texas, but will be opening six new stores throughout August, growing its footprint in the current states but also moving into Nevada and Illinois. Harris says 118 stores are currently either open or in development.
After Wetherill and LeClair joined Jeff’s, many uBreakiFix franchisees were curious about the pair’s new concept. “Now, we’ve started to get traction outside of that group, into experienced restaurateurs,” says Wetherill. “We’ve got a bunch of stores in development, and this is where the restaurant business is a lot harder than uBreakiFix, where buildouts took less than 30 days and didn’t require a permit.”
With this huge goal, the brand is currently hiring up for the incoming boom, a majority of these units being franchised. “We’ve seen the model resonate with prospective franchisees, we have a bunch of stores opening soon—Downers Grove, Illinois, Charlotte, and another store in Orlando are opening in the first week of August,” says Wetherill. “We don’t sign ADAs longer than 36 months, so all the stores under development are expected to open in the next 36 months.”
“I always joke that we’re the most sophisticated 15-store bagel chain the world’s ever seen,” says Wetherill. “We’re a little bit ahead of our skis in terms of investment, specifically in technology, but it’s really about building a strong foundation for the growth we have on the horizon and making sure that we execute on customers’ expectations of us and continue to innovate and stay ahead and create memorable experiences so that people want to come back to our stores.”
