Starbucks Rolls Out Bagel Balls at Hundreds of Stores

The bite-sized snacks are stuffed with cream cheese.

Attention carb fiends: Starbucks has a new menu item to pair with your beloved Pumpkin Spice Latte. More than 500 stores are now hawking cream cheese-stuffed bagel balls, reports BuzzFeed.

The palm-sized creations — priced at $1.75 each or $2.95 for two — come in three different iterations: plain stuffed with regular cream cheese, "everything" filled with veggie cream cheese, and a French toast variety with maple cream cheese. Indulgent though they may sound, at around 100 calories each they're likely less of a diet-buster than the quad shot four-pump grande vanilla lattes many habitual Starbucks drinkers are likely consuming on a daily basis.

According to the maker of the balls, New York-based Bantam Bagels, the product is available in most stores in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and New York City. Eater has reached out to Starbucks to find out if the company has plans to take the bagel balls nationwide. (In the meantime, they can also be mail-ordered directly from Bantam.)

Said balls bear a striking resemblance to the bagel bombs sold at pastry chef and cookbook author Christina Tosi's New York-based bakery Milk Bar, though some of those sold at the Momofuku sibling have slightly more adventurous fillings like sriracha cream cheese and potato gratin. While Milk Bar has sold the creations for years, even offering a recipe for them in its 2011 cookbook, bagel balls appear to be a more recent introduction for Bantam — but one that's already nabbed them a $275,000 investment thanks to a January Shark Tank appearance and a place on Oprah's hallowed list of "Favorite Things."

At any rate, the bagel balls are surely a better choice than the chain's Thanksgiving-inspired turkey paninis, which were recently pulled from store shelves due to an E. coli-related celery recall.

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