About Zingerman’s Mail Order

How Zingerman’s started

Paul Saginaw (Detroit) and Ari Weinzweig (Chicago) met while working at the same restaurant in the late 70s. They dreamed of opening a classic Jewish corner deli in their adopted home (Ann Arbor). When a century old 900 square foot building on a cobblestone street opened up it felt like fate. They opened the doors of Zingerman’s Delicatessen on March 15th, 1982, which is the Zingerman’s business most people think of when you say “Zingerman’s”.

Think pressed tin ceiling and black and white tiled floor and you’ve got the picture. It was a bohemian food lovers paradise, shopped and staffed by friends. It was unique and daring yet familiar and comfortable and people put up with the cramped shopping area and lines out the door because the food was amazing and it felt like things were happening there…important things, even. Food things. It was—and remains—a bustling food oasis with an awesome mix of regulars, college students, tourists, high school students, parents, visitors, first timers, foodies, fans and adventurers. Please come visit.

But what is Zingerman’s, exactly?

When Paul and Ari opened Zingerman’s they wanted to have a Jewish deli in a college town…but that was the extent of their knowledge and experience. They weren’t bakers. They weren’t cheesemakers. They didn’t know much about shipping gift baskets of food across the country—but if they could find people who were passionate about food and driven to turn it into a business, they could teach them how to run that business. That’s how Zingerman’s went from one corner deli to eleven food related businesses and counting.

We’re all in Ann Arbor, Michigan. All Zingerman’s. We started in this college town. And that’s where we’re staying. We don’t have locations around the country. We don’t have a call center in Iowa. Or India. We don’t fulfill with Amazon. We don’t outsource. We insource.

We’ve been shipping food for decades

We packed our first box in 1992 on a prep table in the basement of Zingerman’s Delicatessen. We haven’t slowed down since. Back then we took orders on carbonless paper in triplicate. We had a touch tone phone and a cassette answering machine we bought at Target for twenty bucks.

We launched zingermans.com in 1999 as a separate business because we weren’t sure how this whole “ordering online thing” was going to pan out. (It panned out, so we merged.) There are are probably adults reading this right now who have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s how long we’ve been shipping great food.

We sell the best tasting food we can find

We taste every single product before we decide to sell it. That’s 1000% true. But there’s more to it. Like Alexander Hamilton we’re never satisfied. So we keep looking.

We’re constantly comparing the food we sell to the new food we find. If we like the new stuff better, that’s what we want to sell. It means constantly tasting and tasting and tasting some more to make sure what was true yesterday is still true today.

We are real live human beings

Technology is great. We use it when it makes sense, like this fab website, but some jobs are best done by hand. Take cheese. It’s a living food that keeps developing and deepening its flavors the longer it stays as a part of the wheel. That’s why we hand-cut your cheese to order directly from the wheel right before we ship it out the door. It’s more difficult than grabbing a pre-packaged wedge from a distributor. It takes lots of training. But the flavor is worth it.

When you call, you talk to us. No phone trees. No chatbots. No auto-email. Actually, there’s one, but it’s the most fun auto-email you’ll ever get, promise.

When your order is packed it is packed by us. When we make a mistake, that’s us too. (And we’ll do whatever it takes to make it right.)

Our guarantee is rather crazy

You know how some companies put up a bunch of rules and hurdles to overcome before they’ll give you a refund or ship out a new product? That’s not us. No rules. No returns. If you experience a problem with our food, service, shipping—or even if you simply don’t like how it tastes—let us know. We believe you. We’ll do whatever it takes to make it right. And you never have to return anything.

Our horn, tooted by others

OK it always feels weird to share these kinds of things but they’re also kind of awesome. So here goes.

Zingerman’s is a deservedly world famous deli and gourmet purveyor that spends a lot of time and effort scouring the globe for the best small producers, many of whom they have been working with for years.

Larry Olmstead, Forbes

Zingerman’s top-of-the-line customer service and thoughtful selection of curated gift boxes keep me coming back whenever I want to ship a special care package.

Kat Craddock, Saveur

When it comes to gift baskets, this 40-year-old food purveyor is an expert.

Anna Haines, Forbes