A story sliced and served, get to know Janice Gerges’ inspiration behind the boards.

At first glance, Gone Grazy’s charcuterie boards are a feast for the eyes and a celebration of flavor. Look closer, and they tell a story of family, culture, and intention. Let’s step behind the curing room and slice into the inspiration of Janice Gerges—the brie-lliant mastermind behind the boards.

Beyond the spreads is a deeply personal story that was shaped long before she got her hands on a wheel of cheese or folded a ribbon of prosciutto. For Janice, it began at home, with the man who taught her how to turn passion into practice—her father, Dr. Ehsan Morcos. He and his wife, Fawzia—and her brother Johnny in tow—immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt, settling in Milwaukee, where Janice was born. Maybe you can say her love of cheese started in The Dairy State (and yes, she’s a Packers fan!).

Her father worked as a USDA veterinarian, responsible for ensuring meat met safety and sanitation standards. You can perhaps say, amid those standards and meat inspections, that Janice’s behind-the-scenes knowledge of cured meats started with her father.

In a way, her father’s decision to immigrate to Wisconsin coupled with his career choice foreshadowed Janice’s future. It feels poetic that she would one day build a business centered on cured meats, thoughtful sourcing, and bringing people together over the very foods that surrounded her childhood.

When Janice was 10, the family moved to Chicago, bringing their strong family values and cultural roots. Her father remained a constant presence—working hard, but always with purpose. He believed in craftsmanship, responsibility, hard work, and above all, showing up fully for his family with love and support. Those lessons became a part of Janice herself.

“He shaped me to who I am,” she says simply. It’s a sentiment that threads through every part of her story.

That upbringing still guides her today, as she channels those values into her own craft, passionately connecting people through food—something she inherited from her mother. For her mom, cooking isn’t just a passion, it’s her love language deeply rooted in Egyptian culture.

Janice designs boards not just to be tasteful and beautiful, but to make people feel seen—a reflection of her deep empathy. That empathy was nurtured by her father’s quiet attentiveness. He loved his family fiercely, listened closely, and celebrated their wins with genuine pride.

When Janice started Gone Grazy five years ago, that love, support, and pride were clearly evident in her father’s eyes. He loved that she had taken something as simple as salami and turned it into a full-fledged business—an intersection of art, hospitality, and entrepreneurship, and a blending of their culture and values with the American Dream.  

“He was proud of me,” Janice says. “Before he passed, he really got to see me doing something I loved.”

Dr. Morcos passed away in September 2025, just months after the Gone Grazy storefront opened. For Janice, the timing was symbolic as all the hard work, guidance, and support he had poured into her, now felt like a baton passed into her own hands. In moments of doubt, she turns to his steady lessons: work hard, stay kind, follow your ideas, and don’t be afraid to build, all with the love and support of family beside you.

In every board she creates, there's a quiet tribute: the discipline of her immigrant father who built a life through persistence, and the coach who believed in her potential long before she did. Behind the cheeses and cured meats, and behind the aesthetic spreads and Instagram moments, there is a daughter still guided by her father’s influence. And perhaps that’s the secret ingredient in Gone Grazy: not just flavor, but legacy.

For Janice Gergers’ mother, love was never spoken—it was served. And it was always more than enough.

There were no real recipes in Janice’s house growing up. No worn index cards filed in a box, no half-torn papers with watermarked, smeared ink, no cookbooks with food-stained pages. Nothing written down. Nothing measured out. Nothing even typed in the Notes App.

There was just her mother, Fawzia. And that, it turns out, was more than enough.

Immigrating to the states from Egypt with her husband and baby in tow, she carried her culture and her values—and her gift for cooking—across an ocean and into a new life.

Food was never about precision in her home. It was about presence. It was how Fawzia showed love and how she took care of everyone around her every single day.

So when Janice wanted to learn, she didn’t sit down with a cookbook. She stood right beside her mother and watched. She tasted, she absorbed, and she took it all in. The lesson was never about measurements. The closest thing to a formula her mother ever offered was a single Arabic word: barakah (blessing).

“Our measurements are love and blessings,” Janice says now, with the ease of someone reciting something written within her soul. “It’s a passion for food and cooking—to put in whatever feels right and tasting as you go.”

Love was the recipe. It was the only one they needed.

In Fawzia’s home, feeding people is not a courtesy. It is a conviction. There is no politely waving away a plate. To refuse food is to refuse something far more personal, and she felt it exactly that way: eat, be happy, be full.

Every visit becomes a gathering. A feast.  A celebration of love. Not out of obligation or tradition, but because Janice’s mother simply cannot imagine another way to tell someone they mattered. Food is always on the table. Love is always inside the food.  

Fawzia is, in every sense, the heart of the home. While Janice’s father was the steady foundation of the family, she is the emotional one—the caretaker, the nurturer, the constant. She takes care of everything and everyone, quietly and without keeping score. Always present, always attentive—like the food she served.

“No one can do it better than mom can,” says Janice, and the words carry the full weight of a lifetime behind them.

Both of those inheritances—her father’s discipline and her mother’s devotion—live inside every board Janice makes today.

Through her mother’s love language of food, Janice is a self-taught artist. And the art she makes is not so different from what her mother made every day. From acts of love offered to whoever comes to the table.

“I want it to look beautiful,” Janice says. “I want it to taste good.” It sounds like a business standard, but it is also, unmistakably, her mother’s voice coming through.

After all the preparation and the arranging, after every quiet design that goes into a Gone Grazy spread, Janice still asks the same question she’s always asked. She turns to her mother and says, “Mom, do you like it?”

Because underneath everything—the storefront, the artistry, the boards that stop people mid-scroll—there is still a daughter trying to say what her mother taught her to say. Not in words, but in food, in the way something is made with care and set before the people you love and offered without reservation.

“Because of my mother,” Janice says, when people ask her where her talent comes from, “I just had it in me.”

She does. She always did. She just didn’t know yet it had a name—Fawzia.