New York City bagel shop owners are scrambling to keep up their supply of cream cheese, and in some cases, their customers, as the supply chain crisis has led to a shortage of the spread, a staple of New Yorkers’ diets.
According to a report from The New York Times, multiple bagel shops across the city are taking extreme measures to get their hands on as much cream cheese as they possibly can.
“This is bad. This is very bad,” said Pedro Aguilar, a manager at Pick-a-Bagel, a Manhattan-based chain with several locations. As of Friday afternoon, Aguilar said he only had enough cream cheese to last until Monday, the Times reported.
The manager of another bagel shop told the NYT that he had enough to last him about 10 days. Another manager said he had enough to last until Thursday, but his typical supplier could not tell him when his next shipment would arrive.
Christopher Pugliese, the owner of Tompkins Square Bagels in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood, told the NYT that he received a call from his dairy supplier saying that his Friday order for 800 pounds of cream cheese would not be arriving. “I was like, ‘What am I going to do this weekend?’” he said. “Four [suppliers] just told me they can’t get me cream cheese.”
Another store owner was forced to drive from Brooklyn to New Jersey to pick up 2,000 pounds of cream cheese himself, in order to meet the demand for the thousands of bagels he sells in a day, without raising prices.
Dairy suppliers also are flummoxed by the shortage. “I’ve never been out of cream cheese for 30 years,” said Joseph Yemma, the owner of Brooklyn-based F&H Dairies, one of the wholesale dairy distributors for many New York bagel shops. “There’s no end in sight.”
New York bagel shops go through thousands of pounds of cream cheese in the course of a few weeks, the Times reported. Most shops make their own cream cheese spreads, using unprocessed raw cream cheese as a base and adding their own ingredients and flavors. They cannot use store-bought cream cheese, and their customers would notice if they did, the store owners told the Times.
Phil Pizzano, a sales representative with wholesale food distributor Fischer Foods, said the problem runs up and down the supply chain. A shortage of manufacturing labor due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a trucker shortage because of vaccine mandates, and a shortage of packaging materials.
“It sounds kind of silly, talking about this like it’s some kind of huge crisis,” Pugliese said, but bagels and cream cheese are a “big deal” to his customers, even “sacred.” “I hate feeling like I’ve let people down,” he added.
Several customers told the Times that if cream cheese was not available, they would be less likely to even buy a bagel. “Probably not, no,” said one customer when asked if he would buy a bagel without cream cheese. “That’s an essential part of the bagel,” the customer said.
Cream cheese is not the only staple item that is running short. The Daily Wire previously reported that popular food items from chicken tenders to maple syrup to liquor are all affected by the supply chain bottlenecks, leading to shortages.