Detroit Food Gifts That Ship, and the Ones You Can't Mail

Ask a Detroiter who has moved away what they miss and the answers split cleanly in two. Some of it comes in a bag, a can or a bottle: Better Made chips, Faygo, Vernors, Sanders hot fudge. The rest comes off a flat-top or out of a steel pan: a coney with everything, a corner piece of Detroit-style pizza.

The first group ships with nothing more than a box and some packing paper. The second group has to travel frozen, and only the restaurants themselves can send it that way.

What travels in a plain box

Anything sealed and shelf-stable makes the trip to Phoenix or Portland as well as it makes the trip to Royal Oak. That covers most of the Detroit pantry.

Better Made. The chips have been made in Detroit since 1930, and the company still lists its home at 10148 Gratiot Ave. on the east side. Better Made sells through its own online store. A sealed bag of chips is light and cheap to ship. It just needs a box packed snugly enough that nothing gets crushed.

Faygo. Ben and Perry Feigenson, Russian immigrant bakers, started the company in Detroit in 1907 and, by Faygo's account, built the first flavors from their cake frosting recipes. Faygo's website links to an online storefront. Rock & Rye, Redpop and the rest ship well in cans.

Vernors. The ginger ale is the base of a Boston Cooler, which is Vernors poured over vanilla ice cream. The pop ships fine. The ice cream has to come from the recipient's own freezer.

Sanders hot fudge. The jarred toppings travel well. Sanders is now sold through Second Nature Brands, whose site describes the hot fudge and caramel toppings as made with real cream, real butter and cane sugar, with no high fructose corn syrup. The brand's sea salt caramels are sold there too.

Coney sauce. This is the trick that gets a coney to someone out of state. The chili is the hard-to-find part, and it comes canned. National Coney Island, which has been in business for 60 years by its own count, sells chili and coney kits online and says it ships them nationwide. Hot dogs, buns, yellow mustard and a white onion are available almost anywhere.

Dried Michigan cherries, peanuts and nuts from Germack in Eastern Market, and Jiffy corn muffin mix, made by Chelsea Milling Company in Chelsea, Mich., round out the list. None of them care how long the truck takes.

What doesn't, and how people get it anyway

The foods that define eating out in Detroit are mostly the ones that can't sit in a box for four days. A coney is a steamed bun, a snappy hot dog and sauce ladled on at the counter. A square of Detroit-style pizza depends on a crust that is crisp right out of the pan. Neither is something you can tape up and send.

The fix, in both cases, is that the restaurants freeze the food and ship it, some through their own sites and some through Goldbelly.

American Coney Island at 114 W. Lafayette has been family owned and operated since 1917, according to the restaurant, which calls itself "Detroit's Original Coney Island." It ships a frozen hot dog kit nationwide through Goldbelly, the food-shipping marketplace. The kit serves 12 and is built on natural-casing hot dogs from Dearborn Sausage and the Keros family's chili sauce. The restaurant's own site links to the Goldbelly shop.

National Coney Island, as above, ships its chili and coney kits nationwide from its own site.

Buddy's Pizza traces Detroit-style pizza to 1946 at Buddy's Rendezvous on Six Mile and Conant, where, per the company, a steel pan from the auto trade became a pizza pan. Buddy's own shop page sends pizza orders to Goldbelly, which ships its frozen pies across the U.S.

Shipping frozen food is expensive, because it moves fast and cold. It is worth checking the price and the delivery date before ordering, especially in December. Our holiday shipping deadlines guide has the carriers' 2026 dates.

Building a box that arrives right

A few practical rules come out of all this:

• Go shelf-stable for anything you pack yourself. Sealed bags, cans and jars only. Nothing that says keep refrigerated.
• Think about weather. Chocolate softens in a hot truck. In warm months, pack it with a cold pack or swap it out.
• Pad the glass. Jarred sauces and fudge topping need wrapping and a snug fit so nothing shifts.
• Order frozen food straight from the restaurant. A kit packed cold by the people who make it will arrive in better shape than anything a home freezer and a cooler can manage.
• Check the rules for Canada. Canada does not allow meat products from the U.S. to come in by mail or courier for personal use, which rules out coney sauce. Our guide to sending food gifts to Canada covers what does cross.

The shelf-stable version

A build-your-own box, from $89, can be built around the Detroit food that survives the mail: a can of Detroit coney sauce with our coney recipe card, a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix, Sanders hot fudge, Vernors, Faygo Rock & Rye and Better Made chips. Add hot dogs and buns from any grocery store and it becomes coney night, a few states away. It is packed by hand in Detroit, with a handwritten card, and ships to U.S. addresses in all 50 states.