JustASC

More from the NYTimes on the kosher food “boom,” this time in a profile of kosher cookbook author Susie Fishbein:

According to Lubicom, a marketing firm for the kosher food industry, about 350,000 households in the United States keep kosher kitchens year-round, a number that has gone up by 3 percent to 5 percent every year since 2005 as some American Jews have become more observant.

That sounds about right — the 2001 NJPS identified about 324,000 Orthodox homes, considered an undercount by some, and of course there are non-Orthodox Jews who keep kosher.

Later there’s this stat:

 $15 billion in kosher food products were sold in 2007, according to the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certification agency.

But again, does that total include everything that carries a kosher certification? Has anyone studied how many consumers specifically seek out hekshered products, as opposed to throwing ketchup in the cart that happens to be marked with a “k”? (You can even argue that $15 billion seems low, when you consider that U.S. families and individuals spent more than $895 billion on food in 2005).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 9:02 am and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.