Victorinox’s knife-friendly cutting boards for your kitchen

We recently added the Allrounder Cutting Boards to our range. Sustainable, dishwasher-safe and blade-friendly, these boards are the perfect match for our kitchen knives. Produced in the USA by our partner Epicurean where they are developed and made exclusively for Victorinox, they do much more than just look good in your kitchen. We talked to the Epicurean team to find out more about the story behind the boards and what makes them so special.

Tell us how you came to create the cutting boards. What were the origins of the company?

Epicurean was founded in 2003. We’d been building custom skate parks and we built over 450 around the world during the ten years we ran that company. The material we used to build half pipes, ramps etc. was eight feet long, but we needed only six feet for the skate parks. Since we didn’t want to throw the material away, we talked to our supplier, Richlite, to see if they could suggest any other uses for the leftover material. They happened to mention that restaurants had been using the material to make cutting boards for commercial kitchens for over 50 years. We thought it sounded like a great idea and we made a few samples, giving them to friends and family as Christmas presents. Everybody loved them. We decided to build a consumer-facing brand around these cutting boards, and everything grew from there.

What makes Epicurean cutting boards special? How are they different from other cutting boards?

First and foremost, the unique properties of the material we use ensure that these boards are knife-friendly. They don’t dull the blade of the knife as other harder materials may do, making them ideal if you wish to take good care of your knives. We use a very special material which we call wood fiber. It has the warmth and great looks of a wood product, but it performs like a plastic in that it is light, thin and dishwasher-safe. Our boards are also more resistant to deeper cuts from knives, meaning they are more hygienic and easier to keep clean.

Tell me about the materials you use for the cutting boards. Where do you source them?

The material is actually made from sheets of paper which have been saturated in a food-safe resin. The sheets are then placed in a machine which compresses them with heat and pressure, creating the final material. The standard board is comprised of between 55 and 60 sheets of paper pressed together. We work with a supplier who is FSC certified, meaning the wood used to make the paper is sustainably harvested.

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