Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

Artisanal Israeli Products at Your Doorstep

You could fly back and forth to Israel to keep up with the food and design scenes. But Emily Berg might have a better idea.

Emily Berg, founder of Blue Box, at Levinsky spice market in Tel Aviv. Image by Courtesy of Blue Box

She’s the founder of Blue Box, which delivers hand-picked gift boxes every month with goods sourced from artisan businesses in Israel, from kibbutzim to factories to home-based companies to collectives.

Along with familiar products like olives and hummus, Berg has also dug deep to find rarefied goods like fair-trade organic olive oil, soaps and za’atar from Sindyanna of Galilee, a women-led NGO that promotes coexistence between Jews and Arabs, She’s also sourced handwoven baskets made by Kuchinate, a collective of African refugee women in South Tel Aviv.

Berg says she visits each vendor and curates each box herself; she’s shipped more than 1,000 boxes so far.

Michael Kaminer is a contributing editor at the Forward.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.