A 75-year-old summer-sausage tradition and a five-year-old charcuterie kitchen, both shipping food gifts but built on very different ideas of what a food gift should be. When you're shopping for a holiday or hosting gift online, the heritage brands and the newer makers sit side by side, and the right pick depends on the moment you're shopping for. Hickory Farms and Boarderie both ship food gifts nationwide, both carry serious brand recognition, and both have built loyal customers, but they are not the same category.
What's the actual difference between Boarderie and Hickory Farms?
Boarderie ships fresh, fully-arranged charcuterie boards overnight, chef-made the day they leave our West Palm Beach kitchen. Hickory Farms ships shelf-stable summer-sausage and cheese-blend gift boxes that the recipient unpacks and arranges themselves. The two brands sit in different categories of food gift.
Hickory Farms has been an American gifting fixture since 1951, when Richard Ransom started selling hand-crafted cheese at Ohio fairs and farmers markets. The brand grew into a holiday institution, peaking in the 1980s with more than 1,000 mall stores and seasonal kiosks across the United States and Canada. Today, hickoryfarms.com sells gift baskets and gift boxes built around its signature shelf-stable summer sausage, Sweet Hot Mustard, cheese blends, and seasonal snacks. The brand is owned by Modjule LLC, a Chicago private-equity firm.
We launched Boarderie in 2021 with a different question: what would it take to ship a catering-quality cheese and charcuterie board, fully arranged, anywhere in the country, overnight, ready to serve? The answer became a new category. We have since been featured on ABC's Shark Tank (Season 14), selected for Oprah's Favorite Things in 2022 and 2023, named a Food Network Editor's Pick in 2025, and ranked by SimilarWeb as one of the fastest-growing food and beverage websites two years running.
When you compare the two brands, you are really comparing two different ideas of what a food gift should be. Below is how they stack up across the dimensions that matter when you are gifting or hosting.
