From Salami to $94 Million: How Ambassador Foods Helped Boarderie Build a Charcuterie Empire

Over the last 12 years Ambassador Foods has built ties with a vast array of interesting companies and inspiring business leaders. Everything from giant broadline distributors to the most passionate, artisanal food producers and true innovators in the E-commerce space.

Boarderie is a good example. Ambassador Foods supplies ingredients for their wildly popular charcuterie boards.

Since its founding in 2022 Boarderie has redefined what it means to give food as a gift by shipping fully arranged, catering-quality charcuterie boards directly to customers' doors. Their signature board retails for $139, and the market has responded enthusiastically.

The Shark Tank Moment

When Aaron Menitoff and Rachel Solomon walked onto the Shark Tank stage they were looking for a $300,000 investment and they had the numbers to back it up… $3.3 million in sales, active partnerships with Williams Sonoma and DoorDash, successful Costco launches and $400,000 in profit.

The Sharks bit, and the deal was done with Lori Greiner. From that moment, Boarderie's trajectory took off.

In 2025 Boarderie topped $94 million in sales. The company was featured on Oprah's Favorite Things, further cementing its place in the cultural conversation around premium gifting. During peak holiday season the team now processes tens of thousands of orders per day.

That kind of scale doesn't happen by accident — and it doesn't happen without the right channel partners.

The Complexity Behind the Boards

What looks effortless on a Boarderie charcuterie board is definitely not easy to execute. The company manages nearly 300 SKUs, and each SKU is composed of multiple individual food items — specialty cheeses, imported dried meats, marinated olives, artisan crackers, cookies and more.

According to Angel Jerez, co-founder and COO, efficient procurement and logistics are critical to their continued growth.

With a lean team handling enormous volume Boarderie can't afford suppliers who miss windows and are not proactive. Every item on every board has to be right, on time, and priced to protect margins that are already under pressure at the scale they operate.

"We need channel partners who are on top of it," Angel says. "Smart planning and good communications are the key for us."

That's where Ambassador Foods comes in.

It Started With Salami

The relationship between Boarderie and Ambassador Foods began, simply enough, with a search for better salami. Boarderie needed a higher-quality product and a supplier they could count on. Ambassador Foods delivered — and then kept delivering.

"What Ambassador brings to the table is different from what we had experienced with other distribution partners. Ambassador doesn't just take orders they bring ideas.”

The Ambassador team regularly approaches Boarderie with new product suggestions, emerging specialty items, and curated options perfectly suited to the charcuterie board format.

"They're very resourceful. They don't wait for me to ask," Angel says. “They understand our business well enough to know what to show us, and what not to show us. They always have something new and delicious for us to consider. We can't get the same products through any other supplier or distribution partner.”

Angel believes that what Ambassador offers is quite unique, and perfectly suited to his business model.

"They're on top of things, months in advance and they save us money. Price is very important to us, and they get that. Some logistics companies were charging us two to three times the cost."

"We also rely on Ambassador to communicate with producers," Angel explains. "Most distributors don't have salespeople out on the streets, meeting directly with producers and end users, like us."

What a Channel Ambassador Actually Does

Channel Ambassadors do not fit the traditional model of distributor, wholesaler or broker. It’s a hybrid approach that combines the connections of a broadline distributor, the marketing savvy of the best brokers in the business, the smarts of a consultancy, and the closing skills of the sharpest salespeople.

For Boarderie, this distinction matters. Brokers, as Angel acknowledges, have their place. But what Boarderie needed was something more — a partner who owns the relationship end-to-end, manages inventory, anticipates needs, and shows up proactively rather than reactively.

Unlike brokers, Channel Ambassadors actually own the product and take responsibility for making sure inventory is managed and delivered precisely every time. For a company processing 20,000 orders a day during the holidays, "precisely every time" isn't just nice-to-have, it's the whole ballgame.

A Partnership Built to Scale

The hallmarks of the Ambassador Foods model — proactive sourcing, deep producer relationships, logistical reliability, and genuine investment in client success — are exactly what Boarderie needed as the company has scaled.

Ambassador can handle the volume Boarderie needs, even at peak season. They communicate upstream with producers and downstream with the Boarderie team and with third party logistics companies to keep the supply chain moving without requiring Boarderie's leadership to manage every detail.

It’s a great example of how Ambassador Foods supplies ingredients for industrial food producers. Their specialty imported cheeses, premium dried meats, olives, and other specialty items are the building blocks of every Boarderie board.

As Angel describes it, the relationship is genuinely bidirectional: Boarderie brings challenges, and Ambassador brings solutions, often before they're even asked.

That kind of partnership is precisely what allows a company like Boarderie to stay focused on creating beautiful, high-quality boards while trusting that the supply chain will hold.

Boarderie's story is a compelling case study in how the right channel partner can be a genuine competitive advantage.

In the industrial food production business quality, consistency, and cost management are all mission-critical at the same time. So working with a Channel Ambassador rather than a patchwork of brokers, distributors, and logistics vendors can be the difference between scaling successfully and hitting a wall.

To learn more about how a Channel Ambassador can help your food production business scale, contact us here.