What is ksa dairy?

Includes but not limited to:

Fountain of Youth

Travel Kits

Rooibos Tea Cream

Gold Cream

Breast Cream

Progesterone Cream

Lifting Masque

EFT Daily Eye Treatment

EFT Pressed Mineral Powder

Nia Lip Magic

Nia Eye Color

Nia 3 Plus 1 Lash & Line

Instant Whitening Cream

Equipment, pots, dishes, cutlery, etc that has not been used for dairy and not for meat is also called ‘Pareve Equipment’, ‘Pareve Pots’ etc.

Want an OU Symbol on your product? Apply for Kosher Certification

Kosher laws dictate that if one has just eaten meat, one must wait a prescribed time before being allowed to eat a product marked OU-D.

Kosher laws do not permit meat  a food with meat ingredients to be eaten with or cooked with dairy or with foods made with dairy ingredients.

Kosher laws dictate that if one has just eaten dairy, one does not have to wait a prescribed time before being allowed to eat a product marked OU-M or OU-Glatt. Though it is suggested to either rinse the mouth or have a half hour wait between the dairy food and meat.

An OU-M or an OU-Glatt product may not be reheated on or with any equipment, pot, pan, dishes, cutlery that was used for dairy.

An OU-M or OU-Glatt product that had been reheated on or with any equipment, pot, pan, dishes, cutlery that was used for dairy, would possibly make both the product and the utensil not Kosher.

The product should NOT be eaten with nor cooked with meat or with foods made with meat ingredients.

It is permitted to eat an OU-F product right before or right after having meat.

Products which are marked with the OU-F kosher logo may be eaten and cooked together with Dairy foods.

While Kosher law allows cooking an OU-F product on meat equipment, it has become a custom to have a separate pot for cooking or reheating fish

Please Note the following: On products where the fish content is recognizable – either because the product is a fish or the product name includes the name of a fish (i.e. Tuna Salad) the designation might be a plain OU, as well as it might be OU-F.

In either case, Kosher laws nix eating fish and meat together.

It is in situations where the fish ingredient is not obvious, that the OU-F becomes important.

In products containing a fish ingredient, as opposed to products containing a dairy or a meat ingredient, the amount of the fish ingredient in relation to the other ingredients in the product is the determining factor whether to label the product OU-F or not. If the ratio of the quantity of other ingredients in the product to the fish ingredient is less than 60 to 1, the product is labeled OU-F. If the other ingredients are equal or greater than the Kosher mandated (60 to 1) ratio, Kosher law considers the fish ingredient to have dissipated in the other ingredient and the ‘F’ will not be assigned to the product.

This will explain why some OU certified Worcestershire sauces containing anchovies, are assigned OU-F and other brands are assigned OU. In the latter case, it is because the quantity of the anchovies in the product was small so it became dissipated.

Is Your Product Kosher Certified? Does your company produce products bearing OU Kosher Symbols?

Contact Us to find out how to certify your product and expand your business!

A most honorable and prestigious distinction. The KSA symbol is a firm guarantee to all consumers that the products bearing the symbol are in full compliance with the most demanding of kosher standards. Get Certified.

Question: I’ve noticed that there are a lot of different symbols that indicate something is kosher. An OU, a triangle K, a cRc in a triangle, etc. One of my friends only eats things with some of the symbols, and not others. What’s the difference? –Pam, Austin

Answer: You’re right that there are dozens of different symbols that indicate something is kosher. Each symbol, known as a hechsher, comes from a different organization or rabbi.

So when you see an OU on a package (designated by a U inside a circle, or O), you know that product was certified as kosher by the Orthodox Union. A cRc comes from the Chicago Rabbinical Council. KSA stands for Kosher Supervision of America, and so on. You can look up all the symbols and their organizations here.

Arguably, the best known and most widely available one in North America is the Orthodox Union’s, which looks like this:

The Hebrew spelling of “kosher,” which appears on certain seals and certificates, looks like this:

Since kosher laws require keeping meat and dairy separate, kosher products always specify whether or not they are meat (also known as fleishig), dairy (also known as milchig or chalavi) or pareve (containing neither meat nor dairy).

Foods certified as kosher for Passover get a separate label that says “kosher for Passover” or “kasher l’Pesach.” Sometimes the label has the Hebrew words only, which look like this:

Here is an example of a kosher-for-Passover label on a product:

In this context, the P at the end stands for Passover. Not all products require a separate kosher-for-Passover certification. A full list and guide is available here.

When shopping for kosher products, it is important to remember that just because some items produced by a company are kosher does not mean all of the company’s products are kosher.

Here are some additional kosher symbols you might come across. There are many out there that differ from region to region.

Why So Many Different Symbols and Agencies?

If all products with kosher symbols on them have been certified as kosher by someone, then why do we need so many symbols? Well, because some people only trust certain organizations to do a good job of making sure something is kosher.

For this reason, if you are buying something to bring to the home of a friend who keeps kosher — maybe as a hostess gift or because you are making a shiva (visiting a mourner) call —  it is a good idea first to find out which certifications they trust.

To help explain why people don’t all trust the same labels, I consulted with Rabbi Asher Lopatin, president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School. He said that sometimes a rabbi or organization will accept a halachic (Jewish legal) leniency regarding food that others take issue with.

What’s a good example?

“While there have been some lenient opinions over the centuries regarding gelatin,” Rabbi Lopatin said, “current Orthodox practice, at least in the Diaspora, is to not accept gelatin from non-kosher animals. Therefore, supervisions which do accept the leniencies of gelatin from non-kosher animals are not acceptable to (Orthodox) community standards.” And once you have an organization that allows for gelatin from a non-kosher animal, the community might be nervous accepting that organization’s supervision on any food, even if it doesn’t contain gelatin.

Think of it like hiring a babysitter. If you find out that your babysitter has been giving your kids ice cream for dinner, you might decide not to trust that babysitter to be in charge of your kids ever, even if you ensure that there’s no ice cream in the house.

Rabbi Lopatin brought up other concerns a community might have: “The second issue might be that while the rabbi giving the supervision might be a great scholar, he might not have the expertise to supervise a complicated system which requires expertise in modern machinery and processing systems. The third issue is that sometimes a supervision is just not seen as rigorous enough in really watching what is going on.  There are some supervisions — local and national — where people have seen first hand that the mashgiach [the person in charge of supervising the facility for its kashrut] is not around and that things are going on that might make the products non-kosher.”

Ensuring that a product is kosher is something many people take very seriously, so they want to be positive that the people charged with that duty know what they’re doing, and are present consistently enough to be sure that nothing improper is going on.

There are two more factors that differentiate among the kosher symbols. One is money. In order for a product to be certified kosher, the company has to pay a rabbi or kosher supervision organization to come in and supervise. This can be very expensive, and it’s fair to assume that when a company decides which organization they want to bring in to certify their product, they will choose a certification that fits within their budget.

Finally, it’s worthwhile to note that all of the kosher certification bodies are competitors with each other, and so it behooves them to maintain firmly that their own hashgacha (supervision) is the most trustworthy.

As you might expect, a rabbi whose brother is the head of a kosher certification body might be inclined to tell his community that his brother’s organization is the best one out there. There can be (and have been) all kinds of political shenanigans related to kashrut and kosher supervision, but it’s difficult to know exactly if and when this is going on. Most people come up with a standard policy about which symbols they’ll accept in conjunction with their rabbi and/or community.

All this talk of food supervision is making me hungry. I think it’s high time that I supervise the making of some cookies…