Driving west on the Massachusetts Turnpike, just past Newton Corner, you can't miss it -- Finagle a Bagel, the maroon and yellow sign proclaims. Then, just below -- World Headquarters.

World Headquarters?

Finagle a Bagel hasn't even made it out of Massachusetts; it's barely pushed beyond Route 128.

''I just thought it was funny," said Laura B. Trust, who owns the company with her husband, Alan Litchman. ''It was more of an inside joke."

''It's technically correct," Litchman chimed in. ''And we don't know what the future holds. Someday, it could come to that."

With an eye toward expansion, Litchman and Trust recently relocated their headquarters from South Boston to Auburndale. Now, all of the company's bagels -- 100,000 per day -- are prepared in a building at 77 Rowe St. in the Newton village, and it is also where Finagle makes 2,000 pounds of cream cheese and 400 cookies each day, and cuts 1,500 pounds of fruit a week.

Most of the bagels are sent out to the company's 20 stores to be baked fresh the next morning; the others are baked in the warehouse, packaged, and sold in their stores and at hotels.

Now the company is inviting school and community groups and bagel aficionados to tour its headquarters, find out about Finagle's 14-year history, and watch the bagel makers in action. (Information about tours may be obtained by calling 617-213-8428 or by visiting www.finagleabagel.com.)

''You move, and you find you have all this stuff that seems really important," Litchman said. ''So, what do you do? You open a museum."

''It's not the Guggenheim, OK? But it's close," he said. ''We're in Newton, Mass."

The windows to the main room -- where visitors can watch workers make a 300-pound slab of dough, send it through a ''chomper" to be cut, and place it in a 500-degree oven -- are several inches lower than normal so that shorter eyes can see the process.

The halls also pay tribute to a history of fun, hard work, and gaffes.

''We've done a lot of stupid things," Trust said. ''And we've learned from them."

One of those things was to hang a large ''sesame-seed" bagel above the door of their Chestnut Hill store using painted pumpkin seeds. After the first rainstorm, the seeds swelled up and began pelting people as they walked by.

The symbol on the menu for a plain bagel is an airplane. ''Cinnamon raisins, that's easy -- you put cinnamon sticks," Trust said. ''For plain bagels, it took weeks."

The building was formerly used by Westwood-based ADE Corp., a company that specializes in making semiconductor wafers and magnetic data storage. (The ''clean room," where computer chips were made, has been renamed the ''cream room," where the cream cheese is made.)

In 1991, the first Finagle a Bagel store was opened by Larry Smith in Faneuil Hall. Smith, who worked at General Electric, oversaw a production line whose acronym sounded like bagel. Before weekly meetings to draft reports, his boss would say it was time to ''finagle the BAGEL" so that their report's figures looked good.

Trust and Litchman, who met as students at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, purchased the chain in 1998. At the time, it was a six-store operation. Now, they have 20, which in local bagel prowess places them just below the 23 Bay State stores of Bruegger's Bagels, which is based in Burlington, Vt. Einstein Bros. Bagels, the Colorado-based bagel behemoth, has 417 US locations, but only two in Massachusetts.

Finagle a Bagel has 320 employees and had $20 million in revenue on its most recent annual report.

Finagle a Bagel's current building has enough capacity to service 100 stores, according to Litchman, who said that next year they plan to start franchising.

''Bagels are a very personal thing -- some people like them denser and harder, some like them larger and lighter," Trust said. ''We make what we think is the best bagel using the original methods of boiling and baking by hand. . . . We strive to be a great bagel, but we know we cannot please everyone."

When Smith started out, he tried to dispel the idea that New York water is the essential ingredient to making the perfect bagel. He took 5 gallons of Boston water to New York and made two batches of bagels, one with New York water and one with Boston water. No one could tell the difference. Trust and Litchman later tried a similar experiment, this time using water from New York and Hong Kong, where they had been living. They got similar results.

Trust and Litchman said that they didn't choose Newton as the site for their headquarters for any particular reason, not even for its large Jewish population. They said they also looked at property in Chelsea and Somerville before settling on Rowe Street because it is close to the Pike and Route 128. Several other businesses have headquarters in Newton, such as Richard White Sons Construction, but few are as large as Finagle a Bagel, according to Fran Yerardi, chairman of the Newton-Needham Chamber of Commerce.

Can Finagle draw tourists to Newton the way Ben & Jerry's ice cream has for Waterbury, Vt., and the Samuel Adams Brewery has for Jamaica Plain?

''The answer is yes," Yerardi said. ''Some people are just fanatics about bagels."

Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com.

Finagle facts

• During last year's Patriots' victory parade, sales at Finagle a Bagel stores along the route were up 20 percent. For the Red Sox parade, sales went up 80 percent.
• Worst selling bagel flavors: Banana/apricot/almond; dark chocolate with white chocolate chips; lemon poppy; pineapple mango coconut; sweethearts candy.
• Most popular bagel: Plain. The second most popular is sesame, followed by cinnamon raisin, although whole wheat has started taking over third place in many stores since its introduction two years ago.
• Charlie Conn designed the current Finagle a Bagel logo. He also designed the Nantucket Nectars logo.