A Riviera Beach deli is taking the national spotlight.
The company, called Boarderie, was featured on Oprah Winfrey’s 2022 favorite things list.
It’s not hard to see why. “Boarderie” co-founders Aaron Menitoff and Rachel Solomon gave WPTV a closer look at the mouthwatering deli board.
“It’s a wine cheese, it’s a goat cheese with rose petals and it’s so interesting that you can’t get it at your local grocery store,” Solomon said.
These artisan cheeses are just two of the 35 ingredients that make up meats, nuts, dried fruits, jams, olives and crackers.
“I mean, we source these things from the UK, Spain, Italy,” Menitoff said. “We source these products throughout the year, and the management team has made several trips to different parts of Europe this summer to source these products.”
Back in 2020, Menitoff and his wife Julie Menitoff started the deli company, formerly known as Cheeseboarder, when the pandemic brought their special events business to a standstill.
“It really brought our entire business to a halt. We panicked. We had to figure out a way to keep our employees employed and generate revenue, so we came up with the concept,” Menitov said.
They transitioned from a restaurant business to a delivery deli, realizing that meat and cheese plates were rapidly gaining popularity.
“Cheese and charcuterie are one of the fastest growing trends in the culinary space. We noticed that everyone was making these gift baskets, so we devised a process where we could create a cardboard that could be shipped across the country overnight .”
Now, two years later, Menitoff and Solomon say it’s a shame to have Winfrey’s approval.
“It’s really surreal. I mean, it’s an adventure, and it’s something we’ve been talking about,” Menitov said.
“We saw a lot of other brands on Oprah’s list, and it was something we were really interested in and would love to be on. Then, one day, they just contacted us,” Solomon said.
“We know, and it’s great to see the trajectory of the Oprah effect,” Menitoff added.
A big part of the process is keeping the ingredients fresh. Menitoff, Solomon and the team showcased WPTV at their food-safe storage facility, where they keep dozens of pounds of cheese and fresh meats that don’t last long in the refrigerator.
“They are freshly cut and shipped the next day,” Menitov said.
Boarderie COO Angel Gerez also plays a vital role in selecting artisan ingredients.
“I was a sommelier in Italy and worked for ten years at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Florence, where I learned a lot about cheese and wine. When I came to America, I had a good Opportunity to be a part of this company,” Gerez said.
Gerez also has an engineering background. In addition to helping to source all the cheeses used by the Boarderie, he also helped design an efficient production process, and the company can now ship more than 3,000 cheese boards in eight hours a day.
“We live, eat and breathe Boarderie. We love it,” Menitov said.
To date, Boarderie has shipped around 60,000 boards to individual customers and even businesses, some of which include big tech companies.
“We do hundreds of these every month, just for different companies. We have a lot of local support and we’re just doing it,” Minetov said. “We couldn’t have had better partners, better employees, or more fun doing what we were doing. So, we were incensed.”
Boarderie’s newest deli board even has Oprah’s signature.
If you want to see the list of holidays for yourself, click Gentlemen.
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