Q. Why did you buy a bagel basket company?

A. It was a time when Christian people, not just Jewish people, started eating bagels like crazy. Chains were opening up — you wouldn’t put one store in Akron, Ohio, you’d put five. We were selling into those chains. We were the bagel basket manufacturer.

Q. Were you worried that it might be a fad?

A. I saw absolutely no end to it.

Q. What happened?

A. We had two huge, horrible events occur. The first was the Atkins diet. Everybody was purging carbs from their diet. Plus, baskets from China started coming into Manhattan for $6 — less than what it cost me for the steel. I was paying $7 and selling the baskets for $12. Suddenly, we were hemorrhaging cash.

Q. Did you have a backup plan?

A. I had no clue.

Q. And then you got a phone call?

A. I got a call from a mechanical engineer at Boeing. He needed 20 baskets that would have to be customized. I said to myself, this would be a pain. Einstein Bagels buys 1,000 to 2,000 at a time. “I’m going to have to charge you $24,” I said, thinking, that’s twice what I charge Einstein, and Einstein yells at me. He said, “O.K., whatever.” That was an epiphany.

Q. But you had to up your game?

A. All a bagel shop owner cares about is that the bagels don’t fall through his basket. He doesn’t own a tape measure. It’s a completely different world with Boeing or Medtronic. They’re making a very high-quality product, and they’re putting very expensive parts in our baskets.

Q. What had to change on your factory floor?

A. When I bought the company, we had minimum-wage employees who would hand-bend each of the four bends at the top of the bagel baskets. They would do four bends on basket after basket, all day long. Straight out of Dickens. To make a better quality product, we brought in $3.5 million worth of robots. We needed different people to learn how to operate these robots and computer-operated lasers and other fancy equipment. We’ve invested a tremendous amount of money in training them, and now, 20 percent of our employees are degreed mechanical engineers.