Food carts are a staple of New York City dining, dispensing 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, the smelly gas generators that keep the lights on threaten to put customers off their meals.
Cart owners and customers may not have to suck on 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 30th and Broadway in Manhattan.
“This really started out as a lark last summer,” David Hammer, co-founder and CEO of PopWheels, told TechCrunch. “I’m an ex-Googler from the early days, and this felt like a classic, old-school 20% project.”
Normally, PopWheels battery packs are zipping around the city strapped to food delivery bikes. The team soon realized that connecting them to food carts was an avenue worth pursuing.
“Are e-bike packs the perfect energy type to be powering food carts? Maybe, maybe not,” Hammer said. “I would argue it doesn’t matter. What matters is, can you solve distribution and charging?”
PopWheels currently operates 30 charging cabinets around Manhattan, which serve gig workers riding e-bikes, most of whom use either Arrow or Whizz models. That’s resulted in a “de facto decentralized fleet,” Hammer said, allowing the company to stock just a few different types of batteries to serve hundreds of customers.
Many delivery workers ride into Manhattan from the farther reaches of the city. It’s a trip that can burn a significant portion of their 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 factoring in battery wear and tear, the total cost nears $2,000 per year, Hammer said.
“We can make the economics work so that we’re actually saving them money right off the bat,” he said. PopWheels charges customers $75 per month for unlimited access to its network, and Hammer said the company has a long waitlist.
The startup’s charging cabinets can hold 16 batteries, and PopWheels designed them to swiftly extinguish a battery fire should anything go awry during charging. (The company’s founding mission was to stamp out e-bike fires in New York City, which became a significant problem a few years ago.) After building some initial cabinets, the company raised a $2.3 million seed round in 2025.
Swap sites are typically small open spaces like parking lots, which PopWheels has retrofit with fences and the necessary electrical connections to support several cabinets. Each cabinet draws about as much electricity as a Level 2 electric vehicle charger, which is to say not that much.
As PopWheels’ e-bike service grew, the startup began studying other opportunities.
“There was always a little bit of an underlying thesis that there’s something bigger here,” Hammer said. “If you build urban-scale, fire-safe battery-swapping infrastructure, you’re creating an infrastructure layer that lots of people are going to want to get on board with.”
Hammer started to think about alternative uses for the batteries after someone sent an article about how New York City was working to decarbonize food carts. That’s when the PopWheels team started running the numbers.
Food carts, Hammer estimates, probably spend around $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 matter.) That’s about how much PopWheels would charge someone to subscribe to four of its batteries per day. Conveniently, four of its batteries can supply about 5 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is enough to cover the low end of what a typical cart might draw. If they need more juice, Hammer said they can run to a swap station midday.
After realizing the math penciled out, PopWheels built a prototype adapter and trialed it at a small event at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at last year’s New York Climate Week. Since then, the startup has been working with the the nonprofit Street Vendor Project to move the idea forward. Last week’s demonstration with La Chona was the first time the batteries powered a food cart for a full day.
“I had multiple food cart owners come up to me and say, ‘Wait, there’s no noise with this cart. What are you guys doing? Can I get this?’” Hammer said.
“We are planning to roll this out aggressively starting this summer,” he said. “We think we could be cost neutral with gasoline for a food cart owner while solving all of the quality of life issues.”