Kosher Blog

I’ve a recent (2 month) old letter from Cabot and IIRC, their cheddars are Tablet-K, not OU, with vegetarian rennet. OU thinks that Tablet-K’s good enough in some cases?

Cabot wrote to me about this matter:Dear Alyssa, Thank you for contacting Cabot regarding our cheeses. We are alwayshappy to provide our consumers with information that will help them tobetter understand… and enjoy… Cabot products.All of the ingredients that we utilize to make our cheeses - with theexception of our pizza flavoring and our smoky bacon flavoring - arekosher approved ingredients; thus our cheeses can be certified OU. Unfortunately, at this time their supervision does not include retailbar cheeses. In the case where the cheese will be used as acommercialingredient in another product, such as the Cape Cod crackers, anentirevat can be certified OU. However, we continue to discuss with the OUagency how to provide Cabot’s bar cheeses with the OU certification. Thank you again for contacting Cabot. Please feel free to contact usanytime with questions, comments, or concerns. We pledge to continueworking diligently to ensure you receive natural, satisfying products.Sincerely,

Emailing the OU now …

"However, we continue to discuss with the OU agency how to provide Cabot’s bar cheeses with the OU certification."…without having to pay an arm and a leg!

The OU isn’t replying to emailed questions immediately, as OUKosher.org is currently undergoing some sort of server switch. Happily, this is no problem for us, as I’m friends with one of the three people who replies to the kashrus inquiries.Shapes of the Cape is indeed certified OU-D, or was at 7:00pm tonight, at any rate. She’s going to look into the cheese concerns for us.

From a letter from Cabots: "Cabot is proud to offer a broad range of kosher dairy products. Whether for cheeses, cultured products or butters, Cabot has met the rules and regulations specified by the supervising Rabbi. All Cabot cultured products (sour cream, cottage cheese, dips, yogurt, etc.) and butters are certified OU (Orthodox Union). All Cabot cheeses, with the lone exception of Pepperoni Pizza Cheddar and Smokey Bacon Cheddar, are certified Tablet K. "

I just received a reply from the OU to my previous inquiry:The following are certified kosher dairy when the OU-D appears on the label: Shapes Of The Cape 25% Reduced Fat Crackers, OU-D, Cape Cod Shapes Of The Cape Cheddar Crackers, OU-D, Cape Cod Shapes Of The Cape Smoky Crackers, OU-D, Cape Cod.

How come all of you just blindly trust everything that has the O.U. printed on it? I love the comment, “However, we continue to discuss with the OU agency how to provide Cabot’s bar cheeses with the OU certification.”
…without having to pay an arm and a leg!

Do you realize, that the products coming in from Israel with the O.U. are under “really” reliable hashgacha & don’t need the O.U. on them? Talking about paying more…

Soon, in our lifetime, perhaps, the monopoly of the World Cheese Company may be broken. According to a reliable source, World Cheese controls 70% of the US kosher cheese market and that market is growing larger each day. There are some smaller companies that rely on OK or Kof-K but these are few and far between. To be fair, many consumers request Cholov Yisroel and not every dairy operation can fulfill this need.

That said….
I have done some investigation of Cabot Cheese and their subsidiary labels that bear the TABLET-K - found in many Whole Foods and Costco Stores. Rabbi Rafael Saffra is a musmach from YU (REITS) and has been in the Kashruth “Business” for 20 years. The only negative criticism I have heard about Tablet-K is “not recommended” with no further explanation. Is there really a problem with Rabbi Saffra’s certification or is he simply not part of the “club”? Until there is compelling evidence that Rabbi Saffra is not to be trusted or that he is no longer supervising these products, I see no reason why his hashgacha should no be acceptable. By the way, the Tablet-K is also clearly visible on Precious Mozzarella in the regular and Low-Fat varieties.

Regarding the Tablet-K, I think that the issue that is generally raised is, how is he supervising so many companies? How many mashgichim does he have working for him? Here we have the case of Cabot Cheese - of which in order for the cheese to be kosher, a jew has to place the rennet into the vat of milk. Presumably this occurs daily at the Cabot cheese factory, so who does the tablet-k have doing this? Or does he not believe in the requirement for a jew to place the rennet into the vat of milk, and he is only relying on the fact that they use vegetable rennet.

The other issue with tablet-k is the number of restaurants that he certifies - again I don’t know how many mashgichim he has, but he certifies restaurants that are owned by non-jews and open on shabbat (that in and of itself is not necessarily a problem), but the question is how often does a mashgiach actually go out to check on these restaurants?

These are the questions that I have about Tablet-k, and is part of the lack of transparency in the kashrut industry in general.

I found the tablet-K kosher Cabot cheeses today at A&P in New Brunswick; what a dispointment that they did not go OU

cabot is rennet-free, silly.
read the package.

Enjoyed reading all these comments about Cabot Cheese. I have been frustrated about the lack of variety in the kosher cheese selections and the inability of main stream companies like Kraft to get on the wagon and eliminate animal rennet. I would like to see the OU encourage more companies to comply with the rules and if there services are overpriced they should reduce them to help the community have more access to a larger variety of cheeses.

B”H

From my experience in the kushrut industry, the issue with Tablet K is that there is not a mashgiach at the facilities ‘often enough’. Due to this, certain things that are required of a mashgiach (i.e. lighting ovens, checking that fish are indeed the species they are labeled, putting the veggie rennet in the cheese, etc.) are not being done by a mashgiach.

However, many mashgichim will tell you that most kashrut agencies are just as bad about having someone around and, more importantly, having someone around who’s doing his/her job. It seems that R. Saffra is relying on the concept that it would be highly unlikely (or ‘outside the normal mode of operation’ as many would say) for a place that manufactures vegetarian cheeses to sneak in animal rennet. This concept is used all over the place in the industry to enable us to use equipment without kashering it (e.g. machines for which the usual use is with cold products, even if we do not actually know what it has been used with). To be even more specific, I call upon the powers of modern responsa!

So, I’m going to play rabbi for a minute (bear with me!)…
R. Moshe Feinstein ruled that we can use non-chalav Yisrael milk in a country in which it is illegal to mix different kinds without notifying the consumer, because, presumably, the threat of citations and closure of their business would keep the people bottling milk honest. And furthermore, he ruled that any milk that is certified kosher should be monitored extra stringently to ensure that it is indeed only cow’s (or goat’s, or sheep’s, etc.) milk.

This ruling from R. Moshe Feinstein gets abused in the worst way by the big shot rabbonim. Take for instance the incident less than 10 years back when a certain ‘reliably certified’ milk company was discovered to have been putting shark cartiledge in for added calcium. The solution to the problem, according to the certifying agency, was to tell consumers that any bottle bearing a hechsher was to be considered not kosher but that any bottle without a hechsher could be assumed kosher via R. Feinstein’s milk ruling. They got their hechsher back, in case you’re wondering.

In the US, animal rennet is listed on the ingredients usually as ‘rennet’. If the vegetarian cheese had animal rennet in it, they would have to list it differently (i.e. not ‘vegetarian enzymes/rennet’ or ‘rennet from vegetable sources’) in order to be legal.

In short, my opinion is that the kashrut industry is both a joke and an almost entirely financially and politically driven franchise with very little yirat shamayim involved.

Keep in mind, also, that most local vaads are not accepted by the OU (unless they’re Lubavitch or Yeshivish), especially Modern Orthodox hashgacha, except for products that ‘don’t require a hechsher’.

Most of the rabbis at the OU would probably not even eat chalav stam, so there’s no personal interest in increasing the variety of cheese available to the population. If the small companies that make veggie rennet cheese can’t afford the OU’s price, they go with smaller time rabbis that the OU may or may not approve of (for political or halachic issues).

I think that the reason Kraft doesn’t go kosher is that it would be really expensive for them to kasher their plants. I bet a lot of us wouldn’t buy Kraft even if it was certified, too. It’s kind of ingrained in our heads that blocks of Kraft cheddar are off-limits, you know? They do have some kosher cheese for commercial products. Trisket and one of those cheese crackers (Cheez-Its maybe?) both use ‘real Kraft cheese’ (well, cheese powder) in their products. I assume that both Cabot (for the Cape Cod crackers) and Kraft bought new equipment for this relatively small venture. I know that when the cheese Triskets came out, there was a huge fuss about whether it really was OU-D or a misprint.

Meir,

Was the milk company Garelick Farms? I have a vague recollection of that scandal.

it was garelick farms. Other companies advertised using Jaws music and a animated shark to promote that they did not do that.

Don’t know if anyone’s still reading this thread but… I just received this correspondence from Cabot yesterday. Don’t know what other Tablet-K products I’d trust, but this sounds pretty typical of the larger agencies (read: OU). It’s unfortunate, but a lot of companies and restaurants are “priced out” of getting a hechsher. Anyway, here’s what Michael Provost,
Cabot Customer Satisfaction Manager, Cabot Creamery Cooperative had to say in response to my question about why Cabot cheeses aren’t OU all year round:

“Thank you for contacting Cabot regarding our kosher cheeses…. The ingredients list for our OU kosher certified Sharp Cheddar cheese is the same as our Tablet K Cheddar cheese. In addition, the products are made identically. The only difference is the OU associate physically adds the rennet to the vat of cheese and is present while the cheese is packaged. If we were to have the OU associate at our creamery all the time, the cost of our cheese would increase. Sadly, our wholesale customers in combination with the competitive cheese markets make this request an unreality at this time.”

BS”D

Sarah, the fact is that it’s a requirement of gevinas yisroel that a Jew actually add the rennet, and it must be a Jew who would be able to be a valid witness. I just spent several weeks learning the halachos of milk and cheese from the Gemara through the Rishonim into the Shulchan Aruch and Acharonim and on up through modern teshuvos, and it seems that there’s very little deviation in thought from the rishonim on that it’s a requirement to at least have someone on premise watching or available to watch, and most come down squarely in the camp of actually adding the rennet, whether microbial or animal. So what can you do, if they must in any case pay someone to watch at all times even under the most lenient of circumstances? I’m sure that under the tablet-K, they don’t. I’m also sure that most kosher-keeping Jews don’t eat Gorton’s of Gloucester or Van der Kampf’s fish, under the same hechsher. You can do as you please, I’m just saying that even if you know that the rennet is kosher, the standards for the last couple of millenia, for the most part, is that the cheese isn’t kosher just by virtue fo the fact that kosher ingredients are used. On the other hand, you can be sure in a pinch that the milk used is kosher if it was going to be used for cheese, so that even a cholov yisroel user could drink it.

Does anyone know what the approximate cost to a company like Cabot could be for a full time OU on site representative? I wonder what OU charges that it represents such a significant cost? Is the cost commensurate with the job? The skills required are minimal for the rep, pour and watch. Is the OU charging so much, thus making keeping kosher more burdensome than it should be?

BS”D

Well, when I was under the OU, the cost was basically the cost of another employee. They wouldn’t require a real rabbi, they’d only require an observant Jew. But, an observant typically requires a greater salary than a nonJewish lower level employee. So figure that these days, a full time employee is going to cost a company $50,000 or more, when you figure taxes and insurance, and that’s a lot of money for a guy whose main reason for being there is to dump rennet into vats. Then, Shabbos and yom tov production is out, because the Jew won’t be available. Plus, living out in the boonies, he needs to get into a Jewish area once in a while.
The costs add up. Even if the OU finds someone to work as an independent contractor (unfortunately, in the kashrus industry people are illegitimately paid as independent contractors when clearly they are not)and even if the person would accept less money, the costs to the business still add up in terms of opportunity costs. Especially if the company is in production 24/7/365, it would be an amazing hardship to ask it to curtail production on Shabbos and Yom Tov. It would require a true committment to kashrus, and I would be very surprised if they were committed to it to the point of losing money and/or causing complications in their production scheduling.

It’s too simple-minded to say “trust this one”… “don’t trust that one”… You could have several orthodox hashkachas, that go by slightly different halachic opinions, e.g. the laws regarding oil can be quite complex, and there is plenty of room for variance of opinions. So, if someone tells me that he’s okay with a certain mark except if the item contains oils, I can certainly respect that. But, if he says in a blanket statement “don’t trust them” then that sounds like a position of ignorance to me, not an opinion that is thoughtful, etc. Now certainly, as someone Orthodox, I might not trust a non-Orthodox mark, but I’m not talking on that level. Here’s a story. When I grew up, the Rabbi of my shul did the local vaad hashkachah for my city. He heard that some rabbis in the big city in the neighboring state, did not accept his hashkachah. My Rabbi’s reply was, that this is not how things were done in Europe. In Europe, immense (truly immense) variability went on from city to city, because each Rabbi had his own particular reading of the gemara on various points, yet it was an absolute tradition, that when you encounted an item from a different city, you did not seek to impose your own Rabbi’s rules on the other Rabbi’s rulings! In other words, you recognize the diversity of halachah, and accept that if someone has a respectable smicha, their opinions as they apply them in their own domain are to be trusted. Now, today, we have national organizations like OU, and people presume that their own particular stamp of hashkacha must apply to everyone else or else that other hashkacha is “no good” or “not to be trusted”. This is a bad development in Judaism. If you are going to apply such a standard, then don’t eat turkey any more (ashkenazim accepted sephardic acceptance of this strange new bird, even though the ashkenazim would never have accepted it as kosher), and a hundred other things we accept as kosher today would not be accepted. Think about it. Judaism is a religion, that dafka, is supposed to accept these varying opinions, and allow them all to exist harmoniously. If we refuse to eat foods, then we are turning Judaism into Shammai’s brand of religion, not Hillel’s brand of Judaism.

Cabot cheese is kosher.

Period.

Its manufacturer makes the statement on its label “contains no animal rennet.”

To the FDA, “NO” makes a very important distinction.

Something can be “fat-free” and still have a limited amount of fat within it.

“NO” means ZERO.

The cheese culture they use is kosher.

The only question is who physically adds it to a vat.

The fact that the manufacturing process is under supervision, although not continual, should be sufficient.

Rennet is so concentrated these days that according the Merck Manual, the dilution may be 1:10,000 for soft cheeses.

So…if it were spilled in by accident, cheese with ANIMAL rennet would still be allowed to have an OU.

Cabot uses ONLY kosher and vegetarian rennet.

Yes, I know their cheese cultures are placed in vats intentionally…not unintentionally.

If they used an animal rennet, the FDA would put them into dire straits.

Just as milk in the USA is known to always be from cows making cholev yisrael unnecessary for the states (but not elsewhere in the world where different kinds of milk…horse, pig,etc…have been known to be present in unmarked milk)

The Kashrus industry has us over a barrel…and after paying for kosher l’pesach food this year, that is my opinion…I will, personally,search for every KOSHER alternative I have without paying what amounts to extortion by the O U.

$50,000 for a rabbi to supervise?

I am aware of one kosher food manufacturer that has to pay an amount in the mid six figures (1/2 million) for supervision. This I learned from a friend who worked in management for that firm.

Don’t misread me.

I understand that kosher meat and poultry have been and always will be more expensive due to the level of supervision and the meat which is rejected.

Interestingly enough, if you look at high quality traif meat, you’ll find that we don’t pay that much more. In fact, sometimes we pay less.

With chicken, I have non-Jewish friends who purchase kosher chicken because it is higher quality.

I wish Costco sold kosher bagels.

They use Einstein which come in frozen and marked with an OU. I know because I’ve used their boxes sometimes to hold my Costco purchases.

But they are baked in ovens which are anything but kosher.

So I would never buy Costco’s bagels.

But…

when we talk about a manufacturer like Cabot…

a manufacturer who pays for supervision…

a manufacturer who goes the extra mile and guarantees its kosher (and I guess vegan) clientele that NO animal rennet is used which opens them up for action by the FDA and FTC should they ever lie…

a manufacturer who provides a quality product at a fair price, which price would skyrocket if they had to pay some OU nebish to stand by the vats to drop in the cheese culture…

I am at odds with the OU.

And will gladly continue to purchase Cabot’s cheese just as I do not require myself to purchase cholev yisrael milk.

Actually, some Costco bakeries *are* kosher.
The one at 605 Rockaway Tpke, in Lawrence, NY is under OK supervision (though you have to check the clear wrapping - the stuff that comes out of the oven on Saturday doesn’t have the hechsher printed on it, for obvious reasons. They also print the date on which the products are baked right on the label, which helps with just knowing the stuff is freah.)

This location also has large costco size bags of empire chicken breast.

Maybe other Costco locations have kosher bakeries? Maybe calls to this one can provide information that can be passed on to other costco stores in areas where it would be profitable to have supervision.

—matt

Moshe, Chalav Yisrael and Gvinas Yisrael are 2 seperate issues,

One can have gvinas yisrael made from non cholov yisrael. And one can have gvinas akum made from cholov yisrael.

Nothing what you wrote has anything to do with Gvinas Yisrael, by even mentioning Cholov Yisrael, you are confusing the issues.

Moshe, don’t kid yourself. If the rennet was put in by a non-Jew then the cheese is not kosher, and if you eat it you are not keeping kosher. You may as well melt the cheese over some chicken and pair it with a nice treife wine, because you would not be making it any less kosher.

It may be physically the same thing, but that’s not all that goes into kashrus. Suppose you have a pious and well-respected shochet, and everyone eats meat from his knife, until one day his mother’s mother confesses that she was not Jewish and never converted. Suddenly all the meat that he has ever shechted turns out to have been treif, all the kelim have to be kashered, it’s the Monsey meat scandal all over again, except that there’s nobody to blame except the poor old woman. Has anything physical about the meat changed? No! And yet nobody would claim it’s kosher.

BS”D

Must agree with both sp and Millhouse on this one. Moshe could use a more thorough grounding in kashrus. But Moshe is correct that it’s always kosher from someone’s perspective. Each person has his own standards- some are individual, while others are standards of his shul, and others are standards of the community, or that can transcend place and time. Things have become confused since the early 1800s in Germany, and since haskala in the east. In the old days there was no question that everyone held to acceptable kashrus standards, and the only question was whether they were able to translate those standards into food products which were acceptably kosher by those standards. But nowadays, standards of some communities have been relaxed below what would previously have been considered acceptable minimum, and lack of knowledge among the laymen of communities have spawned unacceptable compromises. I remember when I first became observant, the cheese standard in Berkeley was anything made with non-animal rennet. With Cabbot, at least, there’s yotzei venichnas supervision as well. The fact that the halachic standard is greater than that is immaterial to some in the face of Conservative, which adopted a standard that all cheeses are kosher. To those who see Conservative as a halachic movement, they see Cabot as going above and beyond what “halacha” requires, as would the modern orthodox Berkeley community of 25 years ago. How would any of those people understand that there’s no basis in halacha for that undertanding?

To anyone who questions the standards of the Tablet K, take a quick peak into the kitchens of Kutschers or speak to someone who has been at Darmouth from the first year they started their kosher food program, and you will see why someone of his nature, a wonderful person, musmach of a frum yeshiva, can not be counted on for his kashrus supervision.
its unfortunate and sad,
rob

for those that dont know about gvinat yisrael, here’s a starting point

http://www.kashrut.com/articles/cheese/

What’s Cabot’s “consumer” hasgacha does isn’t outside halachik discourse. It’s just the practice the community as a whole has accepted (not a modern hasgacha inovation).

Sp, I wouldn’t state things in quite the way you just did. According to that article, the OU requires temidis during the entire production (the minimum standard) and also requires rennet to be added by a Jew (the maximum standard). Yotzei venichnas, because it’s not full time temidis, doesn’t qualify as even within the bounds of accepted standards. Because the temidis standard has been accepted for around a couple thousand years as a minimum standard, it’s hard to justify yotzei venichnas as being within halachic discourse, as there’s no basis in halachic literature.

Craig: I think the temidi/place in vat is a chumra of the shach, while the Rema would indicate that one just needs yotzei v’nichnas.

The generally accepted practice became a while ago to pasken like the Shach in this case.

But I could be remembering wrong.

see R. Jachter’s essay on this

http://www.koltorah.org/ravj/13-10%20Gevinat%20Akum%20-%20Part%20I.htm

BS”D

Sp, I believe you misunderstand. The Rema believes that temidis is sufficient, while the Shach paskens that either a Jewish-owned cheese production (by a yiras shomayim) or Jewish participation is required. Nobody allowed yotzei venichnas. You can make the argument that temidis may be required only at the time of the addition of the rennet, and the rest of the time yotzei venichnas is sufficient, but there’s no question that a reliable Jew must be there at the time of addition of rennet. Now let’s look at practical considerations: if he’s there, he might as well add the rennet. If he’s not there (at that time), then the cheese isn’t kosher by standards of most communities, or indeed the Rema.

Just to understand, I am not coming for a halachic learned knowledge. but is the question of temidis vs yotzei vkninas, matter if the cheese has rennet or not.
for instance, mozzarella, cottage etc, maybe doesn’t require temidis, b/c there is no rennett, while cheddar needs it b/c there is rennet
???
rob

BS”D

I believe most are lenient with cottage cheese, which rarely uses rennet (it’s acid coagulated, like ricotta, and when it does have rennet, it’s just to firm up the curd a little) but mozzarella is actually produced with rennet, and may be more of an issue. There are large cottage cheese and yogurt producers under hechsher, but few harder cheese producers, so it must be due to the leniency about yotzei venichnas vs temidis. Still, 1 large cheese company, Joseph Farms, tried to make all of their hard cheeses kosher. The result? They’re no longer kosher, unfortunately.

you didn’t read the article

“This dispute has a major impact regarding the level of supervision required for the cheese making process. According to the Rama occasional inspections suffice, because the Gemara (Chullin 4a) states that “Yotzei Vinichnas Kiomeid Al Gabav Dami”, spot checks are the equivalent of constantly supervising a procedure. However, according to the Shach, a Mashgiach must be available on location to participate in the cheese making process. This explains why it is impractical for a large general company to have its cheeses certified kosher. This is why kosher cheeses are made by companies that produce cheese specifically for the observant Jewish community.”

BS”D

I read it, but I can’t say that’s how I learned it. On premise during the rennet addition, but yotzei venichnas otherwise.

While there are differences among the major national hechshers, modern food production (utilizing multiple sources of raw materials under different hashgachot, has led to homogenization of standards in kashrut among the major and many minor players. This tends to push the standards toward greater stringencies and chumrot being imposed. I may (and do) resent it, but I also understand the economic dynamics that lead to it. It is sadly not feasible for Cabot to pay what would have to be multiple mashgichim at a plant (plants?) that are far from any frum community and to modify production schedules for such a small market. I am grateful that they run special productions at all, though I wish they would do so for other lines of their sharp cheddars.

I am familiar with Tablet K and its Rabbi. After personally being in places under his supervision and discussing his standards and practices WITH HIM, and reading the Cabot statement, I can confidently state that I do not think his standards generally meet even the most lenient orthodox community standards in general practice today. No community rabbi that I have ever discussed this with in the NY area accepts his hashgacha. He may rely on legitimate kulas, but these are no longer generally accepted (just like the Rabbis who certify gelatin may have a real point, but theirs is not the accepted practice). Sometimes its just politics, but I do not believe that it is the case here.

Michael, I agree. As I said, (paraphrasing) “the generally accepted practice is to follow the shach in this case.”

I just think its usefull to know why and what, hence why I posted it.

Also useful to know if someone ever sticks hot cabbot cheese in your milichig dishes, probably have a good basis to say they dont need kashering.