Food carts are a New York City dining staple, offering everything from dosas and doner kebabs to dogs and short-order dim sum. But no matter how enticing a cart’s food aroma is, the smelly gas generators that keep the lights burning threaten customers to stop their meals.

Cart owners and customers no longer have to suck in fumes. A Brooklyn-based startup is testing the use of its e-bike batteries to power food carts from La Chona Mexican on the corner of 30^m and Broadway in Manhattan.

“It really started as a lark last summer,” said David Hammer, co-founder and CEO PopwheelsTechCrunch said. “I’m an ex-Googler from day one, and it felt like a classic, old school 20% project“

Typically, PopWheels battery packs are zipped around town attached to food delivery bikes. The team soon realized that connecting them to food carts was a path worth pursuing.

“Are e-bike packs the perfect form of energy to power a food truck? Maybe, maybe not,” Hammer said. “I’d argue it doesn’t matter. What matters is, can you sort out distribution and charging?”

PopWheels currently operates 30 charging cabinets around Manhattan, serving gig workers who ride e-bikes, most of whom use Aero or Whiz models. This has 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 commute into Manhattan from outlying areas of 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 began offering e-bike charging services, for which delivery workers typically pay $100 per month. When factoring in battery wear and tear, the total cost is closer to $2,000 per year, Hammer said.

“We can make the economics work so we can actually save them money right off the bat,” 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 cabinet can hold up to 16 batteries, and PopWheels has designed them to quickly put out a battery fire if something goes wrong while charging. (The aim of the company was to stamp out E-bikes on fire in New York City(That became a significant problem a few years ago.) After building some initial cabinets, the company last year raised $2.3 million in seed funding for 2025.

Swap sites are usually small open spaces, like parking lots, that are retrofitted with popwheels fences and the necessary electrical connections to support the various cabinets. Each cabinet draws about as much electricity as a Level 2 electric car charger, which goes without saying.

As the PopWheels e-bike service grew, the startup began studying other opportunities.

“There’s always been 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 building an infrastructure layer that a lot of people will want to get on board with.”

Hammer started thinking about alternative uses for batteries after someone sent him an article about how New York City was working to decarbonize food carts. That’s when the Popwheels team started running the numbers.

Food trucks, Hammer estimates, probably spend about $10 a day on gas to keep their generator lights on. (Most cooking is done with propane, which is a separate topic.) That’s about how much PopWheels will charge to subscribe to its four batteries per day. Conveniently, its four batteries can provide about five kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to cover the low end of what a typical cart can draw. If they need more juice, Hammer said they can run to a swap station at noon.

After realizing the math penciled out, PopWheels built a prototype adapter and tested it at a small event at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during last year’s New York Climate Week. Since then, the startup has been working with non-profit street vendor projects to take the idea forward. Last week’s demonstration with La Chona was the first time batteries powered a food cart for an entire day.

“I’ve had multiple food cart owners come up to me and say, ‘Wait, there’s nothing wrong with this cart. What are you doing? Can I have this?'” Hammer said.

“We plan to roll it out aggressively starting this summer,” he said. “We think we can be gasoline neutral for a food cart owner while solving all the quality of life issues.”