Cheese, Please!
Cheese boards are having a moment. Wherever you’ve been during the pandemic, chances are you’ve encountered one at some point—on TikTok or Instagram, at your last socially distanced event, even served as antipasto at your favorite restaurant. Cheese boards are suddenly everywhere you look.
But with social interaction at an all-time low, opportunities to gather with friends for a meal, let alone a shared charcuterie board, are few and far between. Large-scale cheese-and-charcuterie boards are inherently made for gathering, sharing and engaging with others, reminiscent of dining experiences past, from a time long before masks and hand sanitizer. Perhaps because shared cheese boards represent the very antithesis of the germophobia we’ve become used to during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the experience they provide offers back a sense of connection we’ve all desperately been missing.
BoardsbyMo, Kured and Grazy are Boston-based, female-owned companies leading the charge in a swell of new cheese board businesses making the case for a return to gathering and grazing. Business owners Monisha Misra, Gilli Rozynek and Kelley Kevan are here to prove their staying power within this rapidly developing trend. In addition to impressive business models, savvy use of social media and commitment to high-quality ingredients, these women have a keen understanding of the potential cheese and charcuterie boards create for renewed social connection. As the pandemic drags on, these businesses provide so much more than just a food service—they create reasons to come together.
BOARDSBYMO
With BoardsbyMo, Monisha Misra is leading the trend. What started as a side hustle in 2019 has developed into a major business venture. With over 65K followers on Instagram, booming sales and recent expansion into online tutorials and business courses, she’s well on her way to building a charcuterie empire. In the spring of 2020, while she was working from home in software sales during the pandemic, Misra started making boards as a creative outlet; as the pandemic continued, she started dropping boards off at hospitals around Boston to support local healthcare workers. Though she had no plans of developing a business at the time, recipients of her boards began reaching out directly with requests for orders. Hesitant to launch something new while still working full time, she continued making boards for friends and family on the side. But her friends insisted on paying her, and eventually encouraged her to launch BoardsbyMo later in the year. She started with a simple website and partnered with Metrobi for local delivery service, which quickly developed into a full e-commerce business.
From the very beginning, social media has played a pivotal role in her rise to success. With beautiful images, informative video tutorials and an engaged audience, the Instagram account for BoardsbyMo (@boardsbymo) serves as a business card, advertisement and highlight reel all in one. Misra’s organic growth online is a testament to the work she’s done to understand her audience and their interests, preferences and needs. She wants her boards to offer “something for everyone,” whether they’re a chocolate lover, meat and cheese connoisseur, or fruit fanatic. When it comes to sourcing her materials, Misra is insistent on quality. She’s been able to sustain her business through partnerships with wholesale brands like Cheese Lover’s Shop, Rustic Bakery and Cabot. It’s imperative to her that the boards she creates feature only the freshest and best ingredients, and she has worked hard to develop and maintain symbiotic relationships with the brands she partners with.
Misra never expected demand to be so high, but has found major success in diversifying her products. Today, BoardsbyMo offers delivery, at-home kits, corporate gifting, catering for weddings and events, virtual tutorials and online business courses. With lots of exciting new ventures on the horizon, Misra has expanded into a commercial kitchen and is adding to her team. She hopes to delegate some of the board-making and virtual workshop responsibilities to her growing staff and apply her focus to business development. In just two years Misra has turned a side hustle into a thriving business, all while maintaining her regular 9–5 job. And through her charcuterie board business development classes, she inspires a new wave of businesswomen and creators by serving as proof that you really can do it all.
KURED
Gilli Rozynek is changing the charcuterie game, literally. Her business, Kured, offers a fast-casual buffet-style approach to the world of charcuterie. Her brick-and-mortar location in Boston’s Beacon Hill carries a wide variety of meats, cheeses, fruit, olives and nuts to pick and choose from for a custom board or customers can purchase a pre-made option. Kured offers in-person shopping as well as online ordering for curated boards, boxes and single-serve cones available for delivery via UberEats, Doordash and Grubhub. Not even a year after opening, Kured has earned the adoring title of “The Chipotle of Charcuterie.”
Rozynek founded Kured after spending time in Spain during her undergraduate years at Boston College where she enjoyed sharing tapas and charcuterie with friends. She was inspired by the cured meats and artisan cheeses she was introduced to there, but even more so by the culture of this tradition. Rozynek wanted to preserve that sense of community when she returned to the States, so she began creating boards for friends and family and decided to pitch the idea to a summer incubator program at BC, where she would later fine-tune the idea for her business. Inspired by the approach of brands like Sweetgreen and Chipotle, Rozynek set out to create the first fast-casual charcuterie experience and launched her business after BC graduation in 2020.
With an initial round of funding, Kured opened its first location in Boston in June 2021. Morgan Biles joined the team as co-founder, taking on brand marketing, social media and partnerships. Rozynek and Biles run the operation together, alongside a small staff that helps manage the store. Though they are primarily a takeout service, Rozynek prioritized having a brick-and-mortar location because she wanted to offer transparency and credibility, showcasing fresh ingredients that customers could trust. It was important to her that customers “interact with the brand and the food they’re eating,” and she wanted to create an easy access point for those who might be new to the world of charcuterie. The fast-casual concept for the shop is a credit to Rozynek’s innovative approach to business. As a recent graduate, her business savvy is matched by an equally acute understanding of her peers’ interests, budgets and preferences. Despite her young age, Rozynek has a knack for business and speaks with impressive authority about the scalability, franchise potential and long-term vision for Kured. She credits her early success to “timing, luck and a little bit of fearlessness,” and hopes this is just the beginning for Kured. If her first year’s success is any indicator, Kured is on track to become the go-to for quickservice charcuterie.
GRAZY
Kelley Kevan’s vision for Grazy was initially inspired by her love of local produce. During the early months of the pandemic, she was spending more and more time in her community garden and began using its produce to make fresh grazing boards for her friends and family. After an overwhelmingly positive response, she started thinking about ways she could make local produce accessible to more people year round. Kevan founded Grazy in 2019, seeking to create “local experiences at home” for her growing customer base. The ongoing pandemic led her to prioritize delivery, launching a local service that has since expanded into nationwide shipping. Today, Grazy operates out of Food Revolution Kitchen in Stoneham, where Kevan shares a kitchen space with 19 other developing food companies, mostly POC- and woman-owned, offering a collaborative and inclusive community for an emerging class of new business owners that she is excited to be a part of.
From the very beginning, local produce has been at the center of Grazy’s mission. Kevan uses her boards to showcase the very best of what Massachusetts has to offer, even going as far as dehydrating local fruit at peak season so it can be enjoyed year round. Grazy’s curated boards, make-at-home kits, snack boxes and gifts feature vegan and local cheeses, healthy nuts, fresh and preserved produce and more, offering a lighter style of snacking.
As her business grew, Kevan transitioned from gathering produce from her community garden to sourcing local produce directly from farmers markets and vendors. Because of this emphasis on local produce, Grazy has found a niche in vegan and vegetarian boards, in addition to their more traditional cheese boards. Unlocking this market opened up new opportunities for Grazy to cater to dietary trends that favor light, healthy ingredients over the traditional meat-heavy options. Grazy’s conscious and inclusive menu makes the world of grazing accessible to all, regardless of dietary preferences or restrictions. Though this is a challenging time to be a business owner, Grazy has seen impressive growth in its first three years of business by filling a void in this rapidly rising market. Their tag line “wholesome food, wholesome living” rings true to the character and quality of the product Kevan has created.
This story appeared in the Spring 2022 issue.