Kosher Certification: The American Blueprint For Food Inspection

An Interview With Roger Horowitz On How Kosher Certification Improved Food Safety & Dominated Store Shelves

Jun 07, 2023

How Kosher Certification Improved America’s Food Quality Standards

By Patricia Patnode

Certifying food production processes has been a historic challenge for local and national governments. New York tried to remedy the issue of fraudulent kosher food by establishing a state agency to perform inspections, but that state function was ruled unconstitutional in 2001. Luckily there was already robust private inspection market operating in parallel, at a national level to pickup where the state left off.

The USDA met the challenge of organic certification by recognizing a variety of organic food inspectors, but there is still some debate over what products deserve the term “organic.” Similarly, labeling something as “healthy” is a tension the agency is presently trying to figure out.

Reflecting on the history of the highly successful and now widely trusted kosher label, regulators may find valuable lessons in empowering private entities to make occasionally contentious value determinations regarding farming and production procedures.

Roger Horowitz, the author of 'Kosher USA,' a book that delves into the history of kosher certification in America, shared his insights on the lessons learned from private kosher certification firms. We also discussed how both the government and food producers have benefited from firms adopting kosher procedural standards.

Some highlights from the interview:

“The example of kosher has led to a lot of different interests, dietary interests being implementable in the marketplace outside of relying upon food producers to do so. Why do you have free range eggs? They are more expensive to produce, but there is a demand for them, and there is a demand for them because there is an agency that is out there that certifies these things as free range… that is one of the great things about kosher certification, the example that it’s given, and the path it’s shown for greater consumer choice in the marketplace.”
“I always buy free-range eggs because I think being nice to chickens is a mitzvah..”
“It may be that the rise of these vertical farms (in Israel) may be encouraged by the kosher marketplace, and other consumers may be attracted as well for the same reason that people in the 1980’s were to kosher labels on packaged food - people like knowing that there is a tight, safe, production process..”
“lab grown meat, in general, will remain a niche food product, where it will not explicitly replace normal meat, but there will be specific groups of people who are interested in it like vegetarians, and I think that observant Jews will be one of these specific markets…because lab-grown meat will solve a problem, which is that it’s hard to get kosher meat.”

See the entire interview with Professor Horowitz below and check out his book Kosher USA on Amazon.

Patricia: There is a lot of overlap in inspection procedure and independent organization completion between the kosher certifiers and organic foods certifiers.

What are some practical problems that Jews in New York were facing that led to the creation of the Orthodox Union?

Roger: If you’re kosher, in the early 20th century U.S., you can probably count on meat being kosher, because you have rabbis that would certify the meat, and stores that would display that Rabbi-so-and-so certified that this produce was kosher.

The challenge that the rabbis had came from the new kinds of foods that were emerging made - processed foods. Food that is not ‘whole,’ such as a piece of chicken or beef.

What do you do with Coca-Cola? What do you do with ready made pancakes?

And all these products were advertised to Jews, in Jewish newspapers. So, Jews are interested in these products. The products are also widely available in stores, but are they kosher?

There’s no information on the packages at that time, there’s no ingredient requirement on packages. You basically have a package with a name, and nothing else.

Image source: UT Austin

Of course, many ingredients would not have been acceptable. For example, many baked goods were made with lard which is pork fat, and not acceptable for Jews. But, you have packaged bread available for purchase in the 1920s. White bread becomes available at that time, for example.

How do you know if it’s kosher?

There are also many canned goods being made, canned vegetables and fruits. So, there are a lot of new products and it’s a big challenge. How do you know that processed food is kosher?

Back in the 1920s, a man named Abraham Goldstein founded the Orthodox Union inspection service. It’s actually not called the Orthodox Union then, it’s called the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations. So, it is a broader organization that is made of the Orthodox congregations. And it created the OU as a sign that its organization has certified a food.

Now, Goldstein himself is a chemist, and he was a very devout Orthodox Jew — he was very committed— and he was very worried about what was going into their foods.

They start with Heinz, with their vegetarian beans. They look at beans that seem to be vegetarian. But, in 1923, how do you know that they are vegetarian?

How do you know that there isn’t any meat fat in there because there is no inspection of these packages in terms of their content, there are no rules about vegetarian labeling. So, Heinz agrees to start doing certification. However, they don’t want to put a Hebrew letter on the package. There was a K that they could put on the packages, but they didn’t want to do that because they were afraid it might cause a backlash against their purchasing because of the antisemitism that was widespread at the time. So, they work with a marketing person and they come up with a U and a circle logo - and that became the first kosher label.

That certification took place very slowly, it took a long time for it to spread. A big step forward took place in the 1930s, when Coca-Cola decided to become kosher certified. They work with a rabbi named Tobias Geffin who tested Coca-Cola and discovered that there were non-kosher ingredients, some that were derived from pork, so Coca-Cola decided to change their contents to get the certification.

That’s really the origin of kosher certification - there were processed products with unknown ingredients popular with Jews, and there were rabbis that were trying to figure out a way to make this happen.

Patricia: There’s a lot of questions about what terms like “healthy” and “organic” and “clean” mean for products today.

The FDA is somewhat struggling to identify what these vague terms mean. To me, it’s reminiscent of the struggle that New York City had with identifying what was kosher and what wasn’t.

What were some practical problems that the New York City government had with enforcing kosher standards?

Why was the government trying to enforce Kosher standards in the first place?

Roger: Well, New York City had a huge Jewish population that had a natural concern with kosher standards. Kosher chicken and beef were slightly more expensive than non-kosher, so there was an incentive to say that something was kosher when it actually wasn’t.

It was possible to have some controls over what went on at the slaughterhouses that actually killed the animals, like beef and chicken, but it took a while for the meat to move from the slaughterhouse to the store where you buy it. So, there was real opportunity for fraud in that period of time.

There was wide scale fraud, meat would disappear, or kosher meat was combined or stored with non-kosher meat, especially in the case of briskets. There were also some scandals in the 1920s and 30s where non-kosher meat was sold as kosher, so that’s why New York City got involved in regulation— New York State actually in the 1930s and 40s allowed for controls.

A major thing they did to try and control it was to require some sort of attachment to the meat, a “plumba” or a seal that was clipped to the meat and stayed with it all the way through the process. It was very similar to a trademark. So, if you were to buy a chicken in New York in the 1940s, it would have a plumba attached to it that says that a rabbi had certified it and that it had been kept kosher through the process.

With kosher beef, there were attachments that would travel with the beef. It’s not quite the trademark that we are used to, but it was a label to ensure that consumers could trust that it was reliable.

The other piece of this was that New York State created a board of rabbis, to adjudicate debates, or if different processing practices were kosher. Very similar to the way, later on, the government established various kinds of agencies to decide if food was organic or not organic, which is a very tricky issue.

So, you have an effort to create an authoritative body that can decide issues if it is and isn’t kosher, and you adopt essentially symbols attached to the product that attest to it being kosher.

That was in an effort to reduce this kind of controversy, and it worked, it really worked.

There was a real decline in the challenges of products being non-kosher. Especially after World War II, there was a big decline in those kinds of issues.

Patricia: Is that why New York State and New York City gave up that enforcement because there was a private body that was doing it better?

Roger: Well, this is a very interesting question. We had a relatively long period of time when New York State was in the business of certifying that a food was made kosher, really until 2000 this was the case. Parallel to that, a different system of kosher certification grows, this is the Orthodox Union. Rather than a state government or a state body enforcing it, a private agency endorses it, an agency that is able to pursue manufacturers to follow its rules. This is a very different kind of strategy.

The way that Orthodox Union did this was by trademarking its symbol. When a symbol is trademarked, that means an institution owns that symbol, so if you want to put that symbol on your package, you have to secure permission from the trademark owner to do that.

So, the OU through legal means was able to enforce its standards. To put the OU on Coca-Cola, for example, you had to follow certain rules. Rules not decreed by the government, but decreed by the Orthodox Union, a private agency. This was enforceable through the trademark, because if you wanted the trademark on a food, certified as Kosher, you had to go to them and get their permission.

It happens in New York, that the state run system was ruled unconstitutional in 2001 by the Supreme Court. It was ruled unconstitutional because a state agency was enforcing a religious law, and that violated the separation of church and state. When that happened, the Orthodox Union had already widely expanded their certification process to private products, and that model of a private agency using a trademark to enforce certain standards of what foods should consist of, became a standard for organic and for other kinds of certifications. Such as, vegan, cruelty free, vegetarian, free-range… So that kosher standard for Orthodox Union became more generalized as a means for people with certain standards to have a sort of influence and control over the food system, which was relatively independent of the government.

Patricia: Do you think the Orthodox Union's model of certification inspired other secular models? Is there evidence of them trying to learn from each other, or I guess they would be learning from the Orthodox Union?

Roger: There is evidence that the Orthodox Union method becomes more generalized. For, example, the method is not only used by the Orthodox Union. We have the example of electrical standards, there is a label on some products that states that the producers are in line with certain electrical standards of a certifying body. There was a whole world of private means to enforce certain standards.

For example, if you want to get something remodeled in your house, there are certain code rules that have to be followed. These code rules are officially those of the government, but in fact were developed by a private agency that gets together every few years and goes over code-standards. So this idea of standards being established by independent organizations in the food trade is especially inspired by kosher, but we do have it in other places.

What does happen with food certification is that by the 1980s, there was very strong evidence that kosher standards adopted by Orthodox Union and other kosher agencies, encourage people to buy those products. There was marketing research done in the 1980’s that showed that only 25% of the people who buy kosher products are actually Jewish, today it’s only about 10%. People, even non-Jews, want that type of certification for enforcing certain standards for processing and the contents of the food.

So, when organic starts gearing up as a similar model, there is similar research done and the similar methods adopted. Different private agencies place their symbol on a package that claims that something is organic. This goes on for about 20-30 years before the FDA and USDA steps in and establishes essentially a system of government regulation of standards, to standardize the standards.

They wanted everyone to have the same standards, which generates a lot of friction.

The agencies that enforce this actually are independent of the government. The government has a standard that it endorses, but the agencies are often independent. So, this is the first big deviation from Kosher.

It's not simply about the standard, it’s also the methods used by firms to enforce those standards. To make sure those standards are being followed in manufacturing, which can be very complicated. Kosher really established the administrative structure as to how this could be done. Where you have, essentially, a means of verification through the rabbis going into these plants and factories to see if it was kosher. Eventually, this becomes computerized, and once that happened, it became much easier for organic or free-range and other certifications to follow along, because they could use the same administrative structures, they could use the same computer programs, so it wasn’t as expensive or difficult to figure out how to track a product that had 15 ingredients in a factory. Kosher showed the way and set up the structure for organic to follow along.

Patricia: Do you think that blockchain and QR codes attached to different products is going to kind of unleash another wave of kosher certification?

Roger: Maybe, I think that right now the estimates are that about 40% of items in supermarkets are kosher. And the obstacles to the rest of the products don’t really have to do with the technology, there are just certain kinds of kosher products that are more expensive and are difficult for firms to compete in the large market place on price. Kosher cheese, for example, is often more expensive than conventional cheeses, so usually you will not see a kosher cheese-based salad dressing, for example, because it’s just more expensive.

There are all sorts of restrictions on meat and seafood that will prevent a lot of products from ever being kosher.

What’s made kosher so popular is the availability of grocery stores to bring in kosher products that are the same price as non-kosher products, so the decision about kosher certified food doesn’t create a price gap between competing products.

Blockchain and QR codes might help a little bit, but it’s not going to eliminate the fact that some kosher products are more expensive and therefore more difficult for manufacturers to compete with prices.

Patricia: Have you looked into lab grown meat? Is there high potential for kosher certification there?

Roger: I think lab grown meat, in general, will remain a niche food product, where it will not explicitly replace normal meat, but there will be specific groups of people who are interested in it like vegetarians. And I think that observant Jews will be one of these specific markets, who are interested in certain kinds of meat. This is because lab-grown meat will solve a problem, that it’s hard to get kosher meat - kosher meat is not widely available. Unlike other types of kosher products, kosher beef is not that easy to get if you’re not in a Jewish community.

There are lots of reasons for that, so I can see cultivated beef (if it’s considered kosher) being popular amongst Jews. That said, I still think that the attraction to real-beef is so culturally powerful that it will remain a very popular product for Americans more generally.

Patricia: One of the first kosher vertical farms is in Israel, there's also a kosher vertical farm in Maryland, pretty close to where I live. Do you think that type of farming, even localize din the home, will be helpful for people who keep kosher?

Roger: Vegetables are intrinsically kosher, you don’t have to think too much about normal vegetables sold in supermarkets. The issue comes in with leafy green vegetables, like broccoli and lettuce, because bugs can be concealed in their leaves and eating them would not be kosher. It’s very hard to wash lettuce so well that there are absolutely no bugs on them.

If you keep kosher, there are very stringent rules about washing vegetables, for example, and how they are inspected. As you can imagine, having someone look at each league of lettuce before it’s packaged and sold would be expensive. So, this creates an incentive to find a kosher way to produce packaged leafy vegetables. These vertical farms, because they are hydroponic and they don’t have dirt or bugs, are a brilliant solution to that problem.

Because, even though they are a little more expensive to grow, they don’t have the added expense of inspection after harvest.

So, I don't know a lot about this in particular, but I imagine that the Jewish kosher demand for these products helps these farms get going, because they have an audience and market ready for them.

It may be that the rise of these vertical farms (in Israel) may be encouraged by the kosher marketplace, and other consumers may be attracted as well for the same reason that people in the 1980’s were to kosher labels on packaged food - the like knowing that there is a tight, safe, production process…

Patricia: About 0.3% of the United States keeps kosher, generally, about a quarter of or third of Conservative Jews keep kosher, almost all Orthodox Jews keep kosher. And then around 5-7% of Reform Jews keep Kosher.

But, there's still a rather high demand for kosher certification and kosher products and interest in kosher food. Obviously, it's not like a religious interest or obligation, but with organic food. I know that I eat organic when I can, when it's in my interest, but I don't as a rule or when it's inconvenient or there is a price barrier. If it was available, very conveniently I would probably eat organic all of the time, even if I don't completely understand what the different organic standards are.

Do you think that is perhaps similar for Conservative and Reformed Jews that don't keep Kosher as a rule, that if it becomes even more convenient than it is now, that there will be an uptick in interest in kosher products?

Roger: That’s an interesting question, and so is that data. Accessibility is key - where I live, near New York and Delaware, you cannot buy fresh kosher meat. There is ground frozen stuff, but you just can’t get fresh meat. You have to be quite observant, and committed, to always buy Kosher meat. But, some Jews that do buy non-kosher meat probably don’t buy pork. If there was more kosher meat, then it would just naturally become more popular.

There actually is more kosher chicken, it’s sold in Trader Joe's, and places like that. It is a little more expensive, but it’s not that much more expensive. It’s similar to the price difference between organic milk and non-organic milk. With increased consumption and demand the economies of scale really do respond.

The obstacle for a lot of products is on the production side, and I think that will remain an issue for a lot of non-kosher products. There is a similar situation with organic products, as they have expanded more into the marketplace, prices have slightly gone down.

People are clearly willing to spend more money if they feel the product is safer, more reliable. Even if they don’t entirely understand the difference, it means that they can mentally count on it more.

Patricia: Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you think would be helpful for me to know?

Roger: The main thing I would stress is that kosher certification was the first, pioneering certification that relied on non-government agencies to reassure consumers that the product met their particular standards, whatever that might be. And this, as an example, has spread so widely that if you want to buy eggs there is a label indicating how the chickens were treated.

I, for example, am not as concerned about buying organic eggs but I always buy free-range eggs because I think being nice to chickens is a mitzvah, it’s a good thing, and it’s a dollar more, what’s that to me? I can afford that.

The example of Kosher has led to a lot of different interests, dietary interests being implementable in the marketplace outside of relying upon food producers to do so. Why do you have free range eggs? They are more expensive to produce, but there is a demand for them, and there is a demand for them because there is an agency that is out there that certifies these things as free range. That to me is a very interesting example of more democracy going into the marketplace, where you have a particular set of interests, a preference, that relies on an independent certification of method in order to make sure it happens.

To me, that is one of the great things about Kosher certification, the example that it’s given, the path it’s shown for greater consumer choice in the marketplace.

Further Reading:

Kosher USA | Roger Horowitz
Achieve Agricultural Abundance by Challenging the Status Quo | Agnes Gambill West
Where Are All The Vertical Farms? | By Owen Yingling