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By Rabbi Solomon B. Shapiro

Kosher ingredients are like the wall of a building. The strength of the wall lies in the strength of the bricks. If the bricks are solid and strong, and the mortar holding them together is well-mixed, the wall will stand forever. If one brick is loose, ill fitted, or cracked, the entire wall may tumble. Kashrus is a basis of Jewish life. When an Orthodox Jew sits down to eat, he recites a prayer—a Brocho. When he says the Brocho, he wants to make sure that everything that goes into his mouth meets the highest standards of Jewish law.

When a consumer looks at an end product such as a cookie, the label appears very innocent : wheat, flour and flavor—whatever the flavor may be—chocolate flavor, vanilla flavor. It may also include some preservatives. The average Jew who makes a Brocho does not realize that while what he read on the label may only be three items, each represents a unique, special critical problem with regard to Kashrus.

There has been a great deal of change in the inventory produced flavor, manufactured from beginning to end. Today you have a different structure altogether. Equipment is very expensive, and people who spend the money to put equipment in their plants want to utilize it to the maximum. A good example is a spray drier, which operates on a 24 hour basis, 7 days a week, back to back. A spray drier—from a kosher standpoint—presents many halachic problems. The kosherization of a spray drier is not that simple. If you deal with a total manufacturer who does spray drying, and does not discriminate between products, the spray dried product which may contain kosher ingredients will become non-kosher by the time it reaches the customer because of the way it's being used.

Equipment can also be a problem when it is used to produce private labels. In small quantities it can be done somewhere else much cheaper. There are plants that do nothing else but this type of flavors or syrups. Who knows what is actually going on in such a company.

Distributors are also a major headache for kosher supervisors. A distributors may buy in 15 different places and if someone comes and asks to see a letter of certification, he will produce one, but of course this is only one certification when he may be buying from any number of companies, most may not be kosher.

Actually some companies resort to unscrupulous behavior and companies need to be very careful that it does not happen in their plants. First, they are legally liable and second, they risk loosing their business in the kosher market.
Company certification is yet another troubling development in the industry. This happens when someone in a company wants to satisfy the Rabbi. He sends a letter with a statement that this product does not contain any animal derivatives, milk derivatives, or grape derivatives. It may be signed by the Quality Control Manager with a big name, and notarized. While Europeans companies used to resort to this method, American companies seemed to have picked up the same trick.

If a product has no animal, grape, or wheat derivaties, then what is it made of?

There isn't that much difference between flavors in general, and kosher flavors, as far as effective technology is concerned. It has helped them all. It may have helped kosher flavors in that the flavor chemist today has to use less natural products. A flavor chemist in the past used a natural extractor and essential oil to get a nuance because he didn't have any such chemical on his shelf. Today he knows exactly what the chemical on the shelf will give him, so he does't need the essential oil.

By and large, it's good business to be honest, and most flavor companies in the industry have been. As a result of technology, relatively small companies now have the wherewithal to delve into natural flavors of competitors, and reproduce them. So the market in flavor houses is much larger than the few who had the capability, say twenty years ago. And making the best use of the information really depends on the creativity, knowledge and experience of the staff people. And they're not all at the big companies.

Having kosher flavors is good business. It doesn't cost that much to hire a knowledgeable rabbi to help review the ingredients in the formulation, and either tell you which ones have to be removed or which supplier to use. Very often the problem is not with the ingredient itself, but with the supplier say, an animal fat, fatty acid, instead of one that came from petroleum or coconut. Most of the rabbis are very knowledgeable about these source because they are probably supervising their production too.

The end result - after you've been producing kosher flavors for a while - you tend to remove from your shelf those that are non-kosher if a kosher ingredient is available. In time, 90% of the flavors that are produced are kosher, even though they haven't been certified by the rabbis. But if a rabbi looks at the formulas, he can determine that they are, because he eliminates anything that is not kosher.

The real problem is kosher for Passover. The rabbi comes in the day before and cleans out all the apparatus. There can be no production that day. The orders are relatively small, and the next day nothing can be produced in the area where the kosher flavors are being produced. So when a flavor house produces kosher for Passover for you, they are really doing you a favor. A flavor house will try to do all the kosher for Passover flavors on the same day, and if you have time and if you can increase the order a little, it helps. You can't expect any flavor house where you're not a customer to suddenly be excited about your potential kosher for Passover business, because it's just not profitable. But kosher all year certainly is.

This article is based on Rabbi Shapio's presentation at KFI. Rabbi Shapiro is the Kashruth Administrator of Kaf-Kosher Kashruth and Rabbi of Cong. B'nai Abraham of Kew Garden Hills in New York.

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