How PopWheels helped a food truck ditch generators for e-bike batteries

Food trucks are a staple of New York City dining, dishing out everything from dosa and doner kebabs to dogs and dim sum in no time. But no matter how attractive the cart’s food smells, the smelly gas generators that keep the lights on threaten to turn customers away from their meals.

Cart owners and customers may not have to absorb the fumes for much longer. A Brooklyn-based startup is testing the use of its e-bike batteries to power food trucks, starting with La Chona Mexican on the corner of 30th^y And Broadway in Manhattan.

“This started out as a pastime last summer,” said David Hammer, co-founder and CEO. PopWheelsTechCrunch said. “I was an ex-Googler from the early days, and it seemed like old school classics Project 20%“.

Typically, PopWheels battery packs roam around the city attached to food delivery bikes. The team quickly realized that connecting them with food trucks was an avenue worth pursuing.

“Are e-bike packs the ideal type of energy to power food trucks? Maybe, maybe not,” Hammer said. “I would argue that doesn’t matter. What matters is, can you solve the distribution and collection issue?”

PopWheels currently operates 30 charging lockers throughout Manhattan, which serve workers who ride e-bikes, most of whom use Arrow or Whiz models. This led to a “virtually decentralized fleet,” allowing the company to stock just a few different battery types to serve hundreds of customers, Hammer said.

Many delivery people ride into Manhattan from uptown. It’s a commute that can consume a significant portion of its charge, and many workers need two batteries to get them through a full day. In response, Bodegas began offering e-bike charging services, for which delivery workers typically pay $100 a month. When battery wear and tear is taken into account, the total cost is closer to $2,000 per year, Hammer said.

“We can make the economy work so we can provide them money right away,” 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 tanks can hold 16 batteries, and PopWheels designed them to quickly extinguish a battery fire if anything happens while charging. (The company’s founding mission was to eliminate… E-bike fires in New York City(which became a big problem a few years ago.) After building some initial tanks, the company raised a $2.3 million seed round last year (2025).

Swap sites are typically small open spaces such as parking lots, which PopWheels has modified with fences and electrical connections needed to support multiple tanks. Each cabinet consumes the same amount of electricity as a Level 2 EV charger, which is to say, not much.

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

“There was always a little bit of an underlying premise that there was something bigger here,” Hammer said. “If you build an urban-scale, fire-safe battery switching infrastructure, you create an infrastructure layer that a lot of people will want to join.”

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

Hammer estimates that food trucks likely spend about $10 a day on gas to run their generators in order to keep the lights on. (Most cooking is done with propane, which is a separate issue.) This has to do with how much PopWheels will charge someone to sign up for four of its batteries a day. Conveniently, four of its batteries can provide about five kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to cover the minimum of what a typical vehicle can tow. If they need more juice, Hammer said they can head to the swap station midday.

Realizing they had the math figured out, PopWheels built a prototype converter and tried it out at a small event at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at Climate Week in New York last year. Since then, the startup has been working with the non-profit Street Vendor Project to push the idea forward. Last week’s demonstration with La Chona marked the first time batteries have powered a food truck for an entire day.

“A lot of food truck owners have come up to me and said, ‘Wait, there’s no noise in this cart,’” Hammer said. What are you guys doing? Can I have this?”

“We plan to roll this out aggressively starting this summer,” he said. “We believe we can be cost neutral on gasoline for the food truck owner while solving all the quality of life issues.”