The company stayed in the hands of the Manischewitz family for over 100 years. At the time of its sale to Kohlberg & Company in 1990, Manischewitz had $1.5 billion in annual sales, exported products around world, and dominated the matzo market, according to the New York Times. (In fact, that same year, the company was accused of conspiring to fix the price of Passover matzos, and was later fined $1 million by a New Jersey federal court.) In 1998, Manischewitz was purchased by the R.A.B. Foods Group, which recently changed its name to the Manischewitz Company to exploit brand capital. In the last five years, it acquired kosher competitors, including Rokeach and Guiltless Gourmet.
In January 2008, Bossidy, formerly the CEO of Dimensions, an arts and crafts company, took over the management of the company. He says it hasn’t posed any problems, but he’s clearly skittish when asked about it. “I’ve always been in consumer products,” he says, “but I have to say I’ve never been involved in the kosher business before.”
But his appointment is consistent with the company’s focus on growth in the larger secular marketplace. The market of “cultural Jews” (those who want to preserve a feeling of grandma’s house) is shrinking, says Horowitz. Meanwhile, the markets for “traditional Jews” (those who eat only kosher) and non-Jews (those looking for healthy, safer options) are growing and overlapping. “The marketplace will be the final arbiter of what exists and what doesn’t,” says Horowitz.
Indeed, the marketplace has inspired the company to extend into more popular fare, and experiment with the same trends as the conventional food market: portability, portion packs, supplementing products with vitamins, omega-3 acids and probiotics. “We acquired a company called Cuisine Innovations that does frozen hors d’oeuvres and appetizers,” says Ken Janso, the company’s brand manager. “We also have a brand called Asian Harvest—an Asian line offering mostly vegetables, baby cut corn, chow mein noodles.” They’re also exploring the Mediterranean trend. Maybe a line of soups.
Of course, the research and development of kosher products is more challenging than that of conventional foods. “It’s another additional layer of supervision,” says Horowitz. “Not only do you have to find out the fat content and whether there are any potential contaminants, etcetera, which every R & D lab would do, you also have to ask, is this particular ingredient or process doable by kosher standards?”
This can pose some unusual complications. For instance, Coca Cola’s New York bottling plant decided it wanted to introduce a kosher-for-Passover version of Coke. “But Coke is based on secret formulas,” says Horowitz, “so how do you make something that’s secret kosher-supervised? They had to develop a really novel system where they would submit to the OU literally 5,000 ingredients that were all kosher and the OU approved them and let them use any one of those ingredients, so that way they could keep it secret.”
The list of flavours and products that are not available in a kosher form gets smaller every year—even flavours that might be considered repugnant to some traditionalists. Synthetic shrimp products, for instance. One U.S. company called J&D’s sells kosher bacon salt, a zero-calorie, vegetarian seasoning “that makes everything taste like bacon.” But synthetic pork products is where Manischewitz draws the line. “That is something the Jewish kosher market would recoil at,” says Horowitz. “They want to try out all kinds of new things. But if you had a bacon-flavoured matzo, it would not play in Peoria. Maybe in Peoria, but not in Brooklyn.”
