Food carts are a New York City staple, serving up everything from dosa and doner kebabs to dogs and dim sum on the fly. But no matter how tempting the smell of cart food, the smelly gas generator that keeps the lights on threatens customers not to eat.
Cart owners and customers may not have to inhale fumes for much longer. A Brooklyn-based startup is trying to use e-bike batteries to power food carts, starting with La Chona Mexican on the corner of 30Th and Broadway in Manhattan.
“This really started as a lark last summer,” David Hammer, co-founder and CEO of PopWheelstold TechCrunch. “I’m an ex-Googler from way back, and this is like classic, old school 20% of the project.”
Typically, PopWheels battery packs travel around town strapped to food delivery bikes. The team immediately realized that connecting to food carts was the way to go.
“Does e-bike pack the perfect type of energy to power a food cart? Maybe, maybe not,” said Hammer. “I argue that it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you can handle distribution and charging?”
PopWheels currently operates 30 charging stations in Manhattan, serving gig workers who ride e-bikes, most of whom use Arrow or Whiz models. This has resulted in a “de facto decentralized fleet,” Hammer said, allowing companies to supply several types of batteries to serve hundreds of customers.
Many delivery workers commute to Manhattan from areas further out of the city. It’s a trip that can burn a significant part of the charge, and many workers need two batteries to get through a full day. In response, bodegas started offering e-bike charging services, for which delivery workers typically pay $100 per month. When you factor in battery wear and tear, the total cost is nears $2,000 per year, Hammer said.
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“We can make the economy work so we actually save money right off the bat,” he said. PopWheels charges customers $75 a month for unlimited access to its network, and Hammer said the company has a long waiting list.
The starter charging cabinet can hold 16 batteries, and PopWheels designed it to be able to quickly shut off the battery fires if something happens while charging. (The founding mission of the company was to eliminate e-bike fire in New York Citywhich became an important issue a few years ago.) After building some initial cabinets, the company raised a seed round of $2.3 million last year 2025.
Swap sites usually open small spaces like parking lots, which PopWheels has retrofitted with fences and electrical connections necessary to support several cabinets. Each cabinet draws about as much electricity as a Level 2 electric vehicle charger, which is not much.
As PopWheels’ e-bike service grew, the startup began to explore other opportunities.
“There’s an underlying thesis that there’s something bigger here,” Hammer said. “When you build a city-scale, fire-safe battery swapping infrastructure, you create a layer of infrastructure that a lot of people will want.”
Hammer started thinking about alternative uses for batteries after someone posted an article about how New York City is working to decarbonize food carts. That’s when the PopWheels team started running the numbers.
Food carts, Hammer estimates, probably spend about $10 a day on gas for generators to keep the lights on. (Most of the cooking is done over propane, which is a separate matter.) That’s about how much PopWheels will charge someone to subscribe to four batteries per day. Conveniently, four batteries can supply about five kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to cover the drawable bottom of a typical cart. If they need more juice, Hammer said they can go to the exchange station midday.
After realizing the math penciled out, PopWheels built a prototype adapter and tested it at a small event at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during New York Climate Week last year. Since then, the startup has been working with the non-profit Street Vendor Project to move the idea forward. Last week’s demonstration with La Chona was the first time the battery provided food carts for an entire day.
“I’ve had different food cart owners come up to me and say, ‘Wait, there’s nothing wrong with this cart. What are you doing? Can I have this?’ Hammer said.
“We are planning to roll this out aggressively starting this summer,” he said. “We think we can be neutral with gasoline for food cart owners while solving all the quality of life issues.”