Sunday Bagels, the seven-month old business run by a University of Mississippi student and an alum, sold out of its 200 bagels in just 18 minutes during the Oxford Community Market at the Old Armory Pavilion on Tuesday, March 24.
The young business is owned by Andrew Vallone, a 2025 UM entrepreneurship graduate, and Lizzy Lamarche, a senior communication sciences and disorders major. The couple makes all of their sourdough bagels by hand with Vallone’s personally crafted recipes.
“We cut all the dough, roll it, shape it all, boil it all and top them all,” Lamarche said. “So, it’s a lot of long hours. It helps to have an extra set of hands. … It’s a lot of labor, but it’s a labor of love.”
Though the business has seen recent popularity, it began as a small hobby for Vallone and Lamarche’s friends.
“It started as Andrew bringing bagels over to me and my friends,” Lamarche said. “He was kind of tweaking with recipes, and then enough of our friends loved them and said we should sell them.”
Vallone grew up in a restaurant family, so he has always enjoyed making food. He started making bagels after experimenting with his sisters’ sourdough recipes. Originally, he was trying to recreate his father’s pizza recipes, but his bagel experiments are what became popular.
“The pizzas were and still are great, and I make them for my friends on occasion still, but the bagels are what ended up taking off once we perfected the recipe,” Vallone said. “I honestly started making and selling them on accident.”
Sunday Bagels debuted on March 17 at the Oxford Community Market, and the booth was sold out within 30 minutes. Before that first setup at the community market, Vallone and Lamarche were selling bagels out of Vallone’s apartment on Sundays. Their first public sale was on Nov. 15. Now, the market is their main focus, and they only cater small orders on Sundays.
“We decided we needed to find somewhere a little bigger to sell out of that wasn’t my apartment, so we came to the market,” Vallone said.
The decision to have a booth at the Oxford Community market came after Gracen Rinaudo, a senior integrated marketing communications major, made a TikTok video reviewing Sunday Bagels on Feb. 22. The video has more than 21,000 views and 1,377 likes.
“One girl made a TikTok about us that got like 25,000 views, and it just blew us up,” Vallone said. “The next week we posted the link, we sold out in four minutes.”
Prior to Rinaudo’s TikTok, Sunday Bagels took days to sell out rather than minutes.
“In the beginning, it was not selling out by any means,” Lamarche said. “Most times, the order form would be open for a couple days.”
Before they gained popularity on social media, Vallone thought about quitting.
“I didn’t really think it was worth it because we weren’t turning a profit at the end of each week,” Vallone said. “Then, it just kind of started to flip, and we started selling out.”
When Vallone graduated in May 2025, he had no intentions of staying in Oxford, but his booming bagel business changed all of his plans.
“I graduated last year, and I was ready to get out of here and go get a corporate job,” Vallone said. “Then, this kind of took off. Now I’m looking at leases for next year, and we’re trying to find a spot to throw a bagel shop at.”
The business has become so successful that Vallone has decided to focus on it full time.
“I just put my two weeks’ notice in at my other job because this is doing so well enough to the point where I can support myself selling bagels,” Vallone said.
The next goal for Vallone and Lamarche is to get a bigger kitchen to allow them to sell to more people.
“Our next step is to find a bigger commercial kitchen space,” Vallone said. “We have capacity enough to do it out of where we’re doing it now, but to really expand and be able to give everybody a bagel that shows up at the farmer’s market, we’re gonna have to find a bigger space.”
Though there are only two people running Sunday Bagels, there is one more vital member of their team — Remi, the mascot.
“Our mascot is a seven-year-old black lab named Remi,” Vallone said. “I got her in high school as a Christmas gift. … She loves being around people. She’s definitely on the way to being a shop dog.”
The customers, some of whom lined up an hour prior to the market’s opening at 3 p.m., tried to get their hands on a bagel before they sold out.
Haley Weissbard, a junior finance and risk management and insurance major, was surprised at how long the line was.
“Oxford doesn’t really have anything like it, and I think it’s really cool that it’s started by a student,” Weissbard said. “I think the line is a bit outrageous, but I think it makes sense.”
Many people came after seeing social media posts and were excited to see what Sunday Bagels had to offer.
“I heard about them through Instagram,” William Campbell, a senior civil engineering major, said. “Today I got the salt and cheese (bagels) and the chive cream cheese. I’m really excited to try them.”
Some people have been following Sunday Bagels from the start and were happy to get their hands on their favorites.
“I have loved and supported Sunday Bagels since the beginning,” Georgia Hanley, a senior finance major, said. “I’m just sticking with some classics today. I got the salt and cheddar, and I’m really excited to eat them.”
The bagels come in seven varieties: plain, sea salt, everything, cheese, jalepeño cheddar, sesame and cinnamon sugar. They also offer plain, pickle and hot honey cream cheese.
Vallone and Lamarche are grateful for the popularity that Sunday Bagels has gotten, and they hope to keep the momentum going.
“It’s a unique opportunity that we’ve had with the popularity we’ve had,” Lamarche said. “We just hope it continues and hope it’s not a fluke.”
