Bagel Emoji

A round bread with a hole in the middle, topped with sesame seeds. 🥯 is the emoji that started a food fight before it even shipped.

The bagel emoji was proposed in L2/17-261 by Jennifer 8. Lee of Emojination, the grassroots group behind the dumpling, hijab, and lobster emojis. The proposal argued bagels are served "at holiday meals, sports tailgates, office meetings, baby showers, road races, and weekend brunches," making them one of America's most versatile foods. The biggest design challenge: making it visually distinct from 🍩 Donut. The solution was a paler color, sesame seeds, and showing it sliced.

Then came Bagelgate. When Apple shipped its first bagel design in the iOS 12.1 beta, New Yorkers revolted. Grub Street's Nikita Richardson asked, "What midwestern bagel factory did this bagel come out of?" Investor Josh Brown tweeted he was "organizing a march in New York City against Apple's just-revealed bagel emoji." Philadelphia Cream Cheese launched a Change.org petition calling it a "#SadBagel" (82% of 13,000 poll respondents agreed). Within 10 days, Apple added cream cheese to the design. The campaign was produced by Droga5 NY.

Over 205 million Americans ate bagels in 2024. The US bagel market is worth $3 billion. For a bread with a hole in it, that's a lot of opinions.

🥯 is a breakfast staple in messages. It shows up in morning routines ("bagel run 🥯☕"), brunch invites, and deli appreciation posts. NYC residents use it as a civic badge: pairing 🥯 with 🗽 is a local identity statement. On TikTok and Instagram, it anchors bakery reviews, homemade bagel content, and the eternal "best bagel in the city" debate.

There's a subtle generational divide. For older users, 🥯 is food, full stop. For Gen Z, it lives in the same ironic food-emoji space as 🥐 and 🧇, used in aesthetic breakfast flatlays and cozy morning content. It doesn't carry slang meaning the way some food emojis do. 🥯 is refreshingly literal.

The bagel's journey from a Polish bakery to your keyboard spans four centuries and involves unions, the Mafia, a TV show, and a cream cheese company.

Bagels trace to Jewish communities in Poland, with the earliest written mention appearing in 1610 in the Community Regulations of Krakow. The name comes from beygal in Yiddish (from the German bügel, meaning ring or bracelet). Jewish immigrants brought them to New York's Lower East Side in the early 20th century.

By the 1930s, Bagel Bakers Local 338 controlled nearly all of Manhattan's bagels. The union of roughly 300 Jewish bakers enforced strict standards: hand-rolled, boiled, baked. If you wanted to run a bagel shop in Manhattan, you hired union bakers or faced picket lines. A December 1951 strike shut down 32 bakeries. A 1962 strike involving six unions and 10,000 bakers cut weekly production by 85%. New York experienced actual "bagel famines."

The union's grip ended when Canadian Daniel Thompson invented the bagel machine in the 1960s. Lender's Bagels started mass-producing frozen bagels in New Haven. By the late '70s, Local 338 had collapsed. The handmade era was over, but the taste standard it set still defines what a "real" bagel means.

Meanwhile, Montreal developed its own tradition: smaller, sweeter bagels boiled in honey water and baked in wood-fired ovens. No salt. Egg yolk in the dough. Completely different from New York's dense, chewy, malt-boiled version. The two cities have been arguing about it since.

The emoji arrived in Unicode 11.0 (2018) and immediately became the center of Bagelgate, when Apple's cream-cheese-free design was called a "monstrosity" and redrawn within 10 days.

1. 1610First written mention of bagels in the Community Regulations of Krakow, Poland
2. 1930Bagel Bakers Local 338 union gains control of nearly all bagel production in Manhattan
3. 1962Largest bagel strike: 6 unions, 10,000 bakers, weekly production cut 85%
4. 2017Emojination files bagel emoji proposal (L2/17-261) to Unicode
5. 2018Approved in Unicode 11.0; Apple's cream-cheese-free design triggers Bagelgate

🥯 is an American emoji with deep Jewish roots. In the US and Canada, it's a breakfast institution. New Yorkers treat it as civic property: the "best bagel" debate (Russ & Daughters vs. Ess-a-Bagel vs. your local spot) is a contact sport. New York's soft tap water is credited with making the dough softer.

Montreal-style bagels are a different animal entirely: smaller, sweeter, boiled in honey water, baked in a wood-fired oven, no salt. St-Viateur and Fairmount Bagel are the legendary spots. Canadians who send 🥯 might mean something completely different from what a New Yorker pictures.

Outside North America, the emoji reads as "bread with a hole" to most people. Bagels exist in Europe and Asia but don't carry the same cultural weight. In Israel, the related *ka'ak* (sesame bread ring) is the closer reference, though it's a different food.

For Jewish Americans, 🥯 carries heritage meaning. It's connected to family, Sunday mornings, and deli culture. Jennifer 8. Lee, who proposed the emoji, has spoken extensively about food emoji as cultural representation.

• •Over 205 million Americans ate bagels in 2024, averaging about 85 bagels per person per year. 40% of Americans eat at least one bagel per week.
• •The US bagel market is worth $3 billion, with the global market reaching $5.58 billion in 2024. Between 2 and 10 million bagels are sold daily in the US alone.
• •Bagel Bakers Local 338, a union of ~300 Jewish bakers in Manhattan, controlled nearly all NYC bagel production from the 1930s to 1970s. They fought off a Mafia takeover attempt and won.
• •Apple's original bagel emoji was so unpopular that Philadelphia Cream Cheese's ad agency Droga5 ran a full campaign against it, including a Change.org petition, Twitter poll, and hashtag. Apple caved in 10 days.
• •The bagel machine, invented by Canadian Daniel Thompson in the 1960s, ended the hand-rolling era. Lender's Bagels in New Haven mass-produced frozen bagels, turning a local craft into a grocery staple.
• •New York's bagel quality is partly attributed to its unusually soft tap water, which has a low mineral concentration that makes the dough softer and the gluten development gentler.
• •The word "bagel" comes from the Yiddish beygal, itself from the German bügel meaning ring or bracelet. The first written record dates to 1610 in Krakow, Poland.
• •Jennifer 8. Lee, who co-proposed the bagel emoji, is the same activist who brought the dumpling and hijab emojis to Unicode through Emojination. She's been called the "emoji activist" by Harvard Magazine.
• •A 1962 New York bagel strike involved six unions and 10,000 bakers who refused to work for nearly a month, cutting weekly production by 85%. The city experienced a genuine "bagel famine."