John Boos & Co.

John Boos has been making butcher blocks in Effingham, Illinois since 1887, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating kitchen-equipment manufacturers in the country. The founder cut the first block from local sycamore in a blacksmith shop; the company now runs an 87,000-square-foot plant on the same ground. None of that is in question.

What moved this record to the second mark is the company’s own spec sheet. Every Boos board and block page that states a country of origin says the same thing: “Made in the USA with domestic and imported materials.” The R-Board series says it, the round maple chopping blocks say it, the cherry edge-grain boards say it, and no product page checked says anything stronger. The brand-wide “proudly made in the USA” that this record originally cited turns out, on the current site, to describe the workbench-top range rather than the catalogue.

The wood itself is the easy part — North American hard-rock maple, walnut and cherry, cut and glued and finished in Illinois. What the pages do not break out is which materials are the imported ones; on a board with an oil finish and, on some models, stainless feet, the likely answer is small. But “likely small” is not the standard. The top mark is the FTC’s “all or virtually all,” and a company that qualifies its own origin claim on every SKU has declined to make that claim. So this record takes the company at its word.