Food carts are a staple of New York City dining, delivering everything from dosa and doner kebabs to dogs and dim sum in short order. But no matter how enticing the aroma of a cart’s food is, the smelly gas generators that keep the lights burning threaten to turn customers away from their meals.
Cart owners and customers may not have to inhale fumes much longer. A Brooklyn-based startup is testing the use of its e-bike batteries to power food carts, starting with La Chona Mexican on the corner of 30u and Broadway in Manhattan.
“This really took off as a flagship last summer,” said David Hammer, co-founder and CEO of PopWheelshe told TechCrunch. “I’m a former Googler from the early days, and this seemed like a classic, old school thing Project 20%..”
Normally, PopWheels battery packs zip around town, strapped to food delivery bikes. The team soon realized that their food cart connection was an avenue worth pursuing.
“Are e-bike packs the perfect type of energy to power food carts? Maybe, maybe not,” Hammer said. “I would argue that it doesn’t matter. What matters is, can you solve distribution and billing?”
PopWheels currently operates 30 charging lockers across Manhattan that cater to gig workers who ride e-bikes, most of whom use Arrow or Whiz models. This resulted in a “de facto decentralized fleet,” Hammer said, allowing the company to stock only a few different types of batteries to serve hundreds of customers.
Many delivery workers commute to Manhattan from as far away as the city. It’s a trip that can burn through a significant portion of their charge, and many workers need two batteries to get through a full day. In response, bodegas have begun offering e-bike charging services, for which delivery workers typically pay $100 a month. When battery wear is factored in, the total cost is closer to $2,000 a year, Hammer said.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
“We can make the finances work so that we 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 startup’s charging cabinets can hold 16 batteries, and PopWheels designed them to quickly put out the battery fire should something go wrong during charging. (The company’s founding mission was to eradicate e-bike fires in New York, which became a major problem a few years ago.) After building some initial lockers, the company raised $2.3 million last year through 2025.
Exchange locations are usually small open spaces such as parking lots, which PopWheels has retrofitted with fences and the necessary electrical connections to support multiple lockers. Each cabinet draws about as much electricity as a Level 2 electric vehicle charger, which is not that much.
As e-bike service PopWheels grew, the startup began looking at other opportunities.
“There’s always been a little underlying premise that there’s something bigger here,” Hammer said. “If you build battery-swapping infrastructure on an urban scale, fire safety, you’re creating a level of infrastructure that a lot of people will want to be involved with.”
Hammer started thinking about alternative uses for the batteries after someone sent in an article about how New York City was working to free up 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 their generators to keep the lights on. (Most of the cooking is done via propane, which is a separate issue.) That’s about how much PopWheels would charge someone to sign up for four of its batteries a day. Conveniently, four of its batteries can provide about five kilowatt hours of electricity, which is enough to cover the low end of what a typical stroller can draw. If they need more juice, Hammer said they can run to an exchange station at noon.
After realizing the math was off, PopWheels built a prototype adapter and tested it at a small event at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at last year’s New York City Climate Week. Since then, the startup has been working with the nonprofit Street Vendor Project to promote the idea. Last week’s demonstration with La Chona was the first time the batteries powered a food cart for an entire day.
“I’ve had a lot of food cart owners come up to me and say, ‘Wait, there’s no noise with this cart. what are you doing Can I have that?” Hammer said.
“We plan to aggressively roll it out starting this summer,” he said. “We think we could be gas-cost neutral for a food cart owner while solving all the quality-of-life issues.”
