New York is world-famous for grab-and-go food — city dwellers are usually found balancing their coffee, pretzels, burritos, and bagels while tripping down the subway stairs.
But if you’re smelling something good as you walk by a cart, you’re probably also smelling a cloud of noxious fumes from the generator that keeps the lights on in the truck.
One smart ex-Googler might have solved this problem, borrowing the innovation from a newer way of grabbing lunch: e-bike batteries.
Green(er) Cuisine
David Hammer is the co-founder and CEO of battery-swapping service PopWheels. Last summer, on “a lark,” he started a project to bring e-bike batteries to food carts, per TechCrunch.
The Brooklyn-based startup piloted the green trade-in project during Climate Week.
- Hammer reckons that food trucks spend $10 a day on generator gas (not including the propane that is used for the literal cooking).
- And PopWheels’ battery-recharging service is ~$75 a month. So the cost and energy savings are basically a no-brainer.
Charging challenges
E-bikes have popped off since the pandemic, but charging the batteries is a big sticking point for delivery riders.
It might be easy to find an outlet for your laptop at Starbucks, but a battery is less subtle, and landlords can ban batteries at home due to the fire risk, per Streetsblog NYC.
This is where PopWheels comes in, and why they raised $2.3m in seed funding in 2025. Messengers swap out dead batteries at the 30 fire-proof PopWheels stations around Manhattan.
The program is popular: last summer there were around 300 people on the waitlist.
Now, PopWheels is coming for the food cart world.
“There was always a little bit of an underlying thesis that there’s something bigger here,” Hammer told TechCrunch.
“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.”
