Food carts are a staple of New York City dining, serving up everything from dosas and doner kebabs to dogs and dim sum in short order. But no matter how appealing the aroma of the food on the cart, customers can be turned off by the smelly gas generators that keep the lights on.
Cart owners and customers may not have to smoke for much longer. The Brooklyn-based startup is testing the use of e-bike batteries to power food carts, starting with La Chona Mexican on the corner of 30th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.
“This really started on a lark last summer,” PopWheels co-founder and CEO David Hammer told TechCrunch. “I’m a former Googler from the early days, and this felt like a classic, old-fashioned 20% project.”
Typically, PopWheels battery packs are strapped to food delivery bikes and zipped around town. The team quickly realized that connecting to food carts was an avenue worth pursuing.
“Are e-bike packs the best type of energy to power a food cart? Maybe, maybe not,” Hammer says. “I would argue that it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can solve distribution and billing.”
PopWheels currently operates 30 charging cabinets around Manhattan, serving gig workers who ride electric bikes, most of whom use Arrow or Whiz models. The result is a “virtually distributed fleet,” Hammer said, where the company only needs to stock a few types of batteries to serve hundreds of customers.
Many delivery drivers ride into Manhattan from far-flung areas of the city. This is a trip that can consume a significant portion of the charge, and many workers require two batteries to get through a full day. In response, dealers have started offering e-bike charging services, which typically cost delivery drivers $100 a month. Hammer says the total cost is nearly $2,000 a year, when you factor in battery wear and tear.
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“We can make the economy work and actually save them money right away,” 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 company’s charging cabinet can hold 16 batteries, and PopWheels designed it to quickly extinguish battery fires if something goes wrong while charging. (The company’s founding mission was to put out e-bike fires in New York City that became a major problem a few years ago.) After building some initial cabinets, the company raised a $2.3 million seed round last year in 2025.
Swap sites are typically small open spaces, such as parking lots, where PopWheels installs fencing and the necessary electrical connections to support multiple cabinets. Each cabinet draws about the same amount of power as a Level 2 electric vehicle charger, but not nearly as much.
As the PopWheels e-bike service grew, the startup began looking at other opportunities.
“There was always a little bit of an underlying hypothesis that there was something bigger here,” Hammer said. “If you build a fire-safe battery replacement infrastructure on a city scale, you’re building a layer of infrastructure that a lot of people want to be a part of.”
Hammer started thinking about alternative uses for batteries after someone sent him an article about how New York City is working to decarbonize its food carts. That’s when the PopWheels team started crunching the numbers.
Hammer estimates the food carts probably spend about $10 a day on gas for the generators to keep the lights on. (Most of the cooking is done using propane, but that’s a separate issue.) That’s about the same amount that PopWheels charges for four batteries per day. Conveniently, its four batteries can provide about 5 kilowatt-hours of power. This is enough to cover the lower end of the power consumption of a typical cart. If you need more juice, Hammer said you can run to the exchange station during the day.
PopWheels realized the math was figured out, built a prototype adapter and tried it out 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 nonprofit Street Vendor Project to advance the idea. Last week’s demonstration with La Chona was the first time the battery powered a food cart for an entire day.
“I’ve had multiple food cart owners come up to me and say, ‘Wait, this cart doesn’t make any noise. What are you guys doing? Can I have this?'” Hammer said.
“We plan to roll this out aggressively starting this summer,” he said. “We think we can make gas cost neutral for food cart owners while solving all the quality of life issues.”
