PBN 2023 Business Women Awards
ACHIEVEMENT HONOREE: Milena Pagan | Rebelle Artisan Bagels LLC owner
MILENA PAGAN WAS A RETAIL STRATEGIST for CVS Health Corp. in 2016 when she told the pharmacy giant she was quitting this steady job with a good salary to open a bagel shop. She told her family and friends, too.
Did she get pushback?
“I am sure people privately thought that I was crazy,” said Puerto Rico-born Pagan, who had no experience in professional bagel-making or owning a food establishment at that point. “But I am not here for people who tell me I can’t do something. To those people, I say, ‘Just watch me.’ ”
Pagan, who has a chemical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set about putting the pieces in place to launch Rebelle Artisan Bagels LLC on Providence’s East Side. Her goal was to make the kind of bagels that she used to get when she lived in Brooklyn, N.Y.
First, some patience came into play. Tinkering with the bagel-making process in her home kitchen gave her confidence that she could do it. Creating high-quality bagels may be time-consuming, but she’s proved the result can be worth it.
Over 24 hours of work go into each bagel. The dough is divided and rolled by hand, then put in a cooler for slow fermentation. The bagels are then boiled in a malted barley bath before they are baked to the point that a blistery crust forms, making them crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, Pagan says.
So, after quitting her job, spending experimentation time in her kitchen and committing to taking her venture large scale, she used kitchen space in the Hope & Main incubator in Warren. But there was no small-business loan. Rebelle was bootstrapped in part with a Kickstarter campaign. Pagan said the company didn’t access financing until the opening of a second Providence location in 2020 – an all-day cafe called Little Sister LLC.
Rebelle Artisan Bagels’ success has come in many forms: its profits, reviews and growth. Even Pagan’s former boss at CVS frequents Rebelle and eats the bagels.
“He loves them,” Pagan said proudly. Having brought that little bit of Brooklyn to Providence, Pagan moved on to tackle challenges and expand on her accomplishment.
Dynamics on the East Side don’t always mesh with hourly work, says Pagan, meaning staff members have to commute in from Federal Hill and other neighborhoods in the city.
But she sees the challenges as rewarding to tackle.
“I’m in this because it’s a fun ride,” said Pagan, who is planning a third location in Cambridge, Mass. “I’m not trying to build a rocket and go to the moon. I’m just making bagels in Providence.”
