Food carts are a staple of New York City restaurants, dishing out everything from dosa and doner kebabs to dogs and dim sum in no time. But as enticing as the aroma of food from a cart is, the smelly gas generators that keep the lights on threaten to dissuade customers from eating their meals.
Cart owners and customers may not have to vacuum up fumes any longer. A Brooklyn-based startup is testing using its e-bike batteries to power food carts, starting with La Chona Mexican on the corner of 30th and Broadway in Manhattan.
“It really started as a joke last summer,” said David Hammer, co-founder and CEO of Pop Wheelstold TechCrunch. “I’ve been an old Googler since I started, and this felt like an old-school classic. 20% project.”
Normally, PopWheels batteries travel around the city attached to food delivery bikes. The team quickly realized that connecting them to food carts was a way to go.
“Are e-bike packs the ideal type of energy to power food carts? Maybe, maybe not,” Hammer said. “I would say it doesn’t matter. What matters is can you solve distribution and billing?”
PopWheels currently operates 30 charging stations around Manhattan, which serve gig workers using 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 just a few different battery types to serve hundreds of customers.
Many delivery people arrive in Manhattan from the outer reaches of the city. This is a trip that can consume a significant portion of their charge, and many workers need two batteries to last a full day. In response, bodegas have started offering e-bike charging services, for which delivery workers typically pay $100 a month. Factoring in battery wear and tear, the total cost approaches $2,000 a year, Hammer said.
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“We can make the economics work in a way that saves them money upfront,” he said. PopWheels charges its 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 extinguish a battery fire if something goes wrong while charging. (The company’s founding mission was to eradicate Electric bike fires in New York(which became a significant issue a few years ago.) After building a few initial cabinets, the company raised a $2.3 million seed round last year (2025).
Swap sites are typically small, open spaces like parking lots, which PopWheels has retrofitted with fencing and the electrical connections needed to support multiple cabinets. Each cabinet uses as much electricity as a Level 2 electric vehicle charger, which is to say not that much.
As the PopWheels e-bike service grew, the startup began exploring other opportunities.
“There was always an underlying thesis that there was something bigger here,” Hammer said. “If you build an urban-scale, fire-proof battery swap infrastructure, you create a layer of infrastructure that many people will want to buy into.”
Hammer started thinking about alternative uses for batteries after someone sent in an article about how New York City was working to decarbonize food carts. That’s when the PopWheels team started crunching 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 on propane, which is another matter.) That’s about how much PopWheels would charge someone to subscribe to four of its batteries per day. Ideally, four of its batteries can provide around five kilowatt hours of electricity, which is enough to cover the minimum consumption of a typical cart. If they need more juice, Hammer said they can go to a swap station at noon.
After running the calculations, 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 Street Vendor Project, a nonprofit, to advance the idea. Last week’s demonstration with La Chona was the first time the batteries powered a food cart for a full day.
“I’ve had several food cart owners come up to me and say, ‘Wait, there’s no noise with this cart. 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 could reduce costs by providing gas to a food cart owner while solving all the quality of life issues.”
Tim De Chant is senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was a founding editor.
De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s graduate science writing program, and he received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his doctorate in environmental science, policy and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his bachelor’s degree in environmental studies, English and biology from St. Olaf College.
You can contact or check Tim’s outreach by sending an email tim.dechant@techcrunch.com.