Walk into any kitchen store and look at the wooden cutting board selection.
Fig 1. Cutting board selection (illustration)
At first glance, it appears there is a wide variety of choices: cherry or maple, juice groove or no juice groove, edge grain or end grain. Different sizes and shapes.
But if you are looking for a 100% plastic free option you’ll likely be out of luck: they're all made from strips of wood held together with wood glue (a plastic that sheds microplastics).
Solid wood cutting boards are a niche product these days.
Until a few years ago (six to be exact), I had never given this much thought. Who would?
I had simply assumed that cutting boards all look this way for a reason; that this construction method must be better, stronger, more durable, or somehow better for cutting.
Woodworkers and manufacturers often repeat this idea, too: that glued strips of wood are better than solid wood.
But it only took me a few months of using a solid wood board to drop this assumption, as I simply preferred the solid board to my glued ones.
While glue has some merits for enhancing wood's structure in certain applications, the benefits for cutting boards are debated by woodworkers and researchers alike.
Glue would not have been present in cutting boards (a simple invention that is thousands of years old) until the middle of the 20th century, and solid wood’s strength is evidenced by a large selection of antique cutting boards (some having been in service for 100+ years) available on vintage sites.
So why do all cutting boards look like this now?
Fig 2. Strips of wood glued together into a cutting board (illustration)
What glue does very well is solve manufacturing problems.
It makes cutting boards easier to make.
In fact, glue makes things so much easier at every step of the process, there is no wonder it has become the default. Before starting Salzmark, I would have thought it sounds simple: "Just carve it out of solid wood, I don't get it." But the appeal of glue became clear from the first few conversations we had with mills.
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Glue makes sourcing wood easier
The hardest part of making our cutting boards at Salzmark is finding enough quality maple lumber that is also wide enough to be carved into a cutting board.
I was surprised by how many mills told us they would not be able to provide the maple we wanted in any predictable manner (early on, before finding the mill in New York we work with now, I began to think starting a company around solid wood boards would not be possible).
We need planks at least ten inches wide for our cutting boards. Those are less common than narrower boards, since maple trees don’t all grow straight and wide.
Glue removes this constraint entirely.
If we made boards from glued strips, the width of the original source material wouldn’t matter.
Boards two inches wide or ten inches wide could all be cut into uniform strips and glued together, resulting in a uniform final product. Furthermore, if the quality is slightly mixed between lumber sources, it won't show as much in the final product.
Fig. 3 Lumber at different widths (illustration)
From a sourcing perspective, that is incredibly efficient. That flexibility would have been miraculous when it became common in the mid 20th century.
Being able to use a variety of wood means any gaps in lumber supply are far less likely.
When we ask a mill how many ten-inch-wide boards they’ll have next month, the answer is often “We will know after we cut the logs.” Sometimes, once they do that, only narrower boards are available.
If we could work with lumber at any width, that uncertainty would largely disappear: we could take what they have every time, regardless of the width.
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Glue reduces labor at the mill
After the lumber is cut into planks, boards of different widths are stacked together.
Pulling out wide boards takes extra work. Employees have to sort through stacks, measure pieces, and separate out the few that meet the required dimensions.
If everything is going to be cut into strips anyway, much of that work can be skipped.
The mill can ship a mix of planks of different widths to the manufacturer knowing that they will do further processing on their side.
From the mill’s perspective, it’s a cleaner process to work with buyers that don't have hard limits on the width of wood they need.
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Glue reduces waste in the workshop (which saves costs)
As wood is a natural material, knots, irregular areas, and some unpredictability are part of the deal. We buy the highest grade number (fewer knots), but even so, variations in wood can make large sections unusable.
If you’re carving a cutting board from a single solid plank and a knot or defect sits in the wrong place, that entire section becomes unusable. If a few knots were distributed down a plank, even an entire 10 foot plank may be unusable for us once it reaches the shop.
Fig 4. A distribution of knots that would make lumber unusable for our cutting boards (illustration)
When cutting that same plank down into narrow strips for a glue-up, those same defects can be worked around. A knot in this case means one strip will be lost, not an entire cutting board.
More of each plank gets used. Fewer boards are rejected.
It’s an elegant way to get the most out of the material.
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So why don’t we use glue?
My main motivation for starting Salzmark was my own frustration at not being able to find products that avoided synthetics and modern chemicals entirely.
As a buyer, I would imagine the version I wanted—food in glass instead of plastic, cutting boards without glue—and then hit a wall trying to find it.
The thought I kept having was some version of: "I understand this is probably harder to make, that not everyone will care, and that it might cost more. Please do it anyway." I started Salzmark to be able to make the versions of things I was looking for.
Because of that, we’re not optimizing for ease of production or volume and have accepted some inconveniences along the way, including the ones that come with not using glue.
And while I like knowing that our cutting boards do not shed the microplastics or processing chemicals that may be found in other wooden boards, the experience of using solid wood boards is what excites me most about making them.
I love the way they feel, the visible tree rings, and seeing the wood change in color and texture over time.
Long before I ever gave glue and mineral oil much thought, I was gifted a solid maple cutting board (the original inspiration for Salzmark). I found myself instinctively reaching for this one over my glued boards every time.
Fig 5. The Salzmark One