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| Re: Stella D'oro's Bronx, NY factory to close following dispute with union (471126) | |||
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Re: Stella D'oro's Bronx, NY factory to close following dispute with union |
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Posted by trainsarefun on Tue Jul 7 10:37:59 2009, in response to Re: Stella D'oro's Bronx, NY factory to close following dispute with union, posted by Peter Rosa on Tue Jul 7 10:30:31 2009. Some background here.excerpt: January 12, 2003 Of Milk and Cookies, or How Orthodox Jews Saved an Italian Recipe By JOSEPH BERGER Correction Appended Stella D'Oro, the Bronx-based baker of cookies and breadsticks, was founded in 1932 by an Italian immigrant couple, but in one of those lyrical convergences of ethnicities that gives New York City its special flavor, Stella D'Oro's cookies have for 45 years held a special place in the hearts of many Orthodox Jews. The reason: they are one of the few widely available cookies made without milk or butter, and thus are able to be eaten immediately after meat by those who adhere to Jewish dietary laws. Even Stella D'Oro's Swiss Fudge cookies -- so treasured for their chocolate centers that they have been nicknamed shtreimels, the Yiddish term for round fur hats worn on the Sabbath -- are pareve, meaning with no trace of meat or dairy products and so servable as an all-purpose dessert. That longtime allegiance explains why aggravation rippled through the streets of Flatbush and Borough Park and the cul-de-sacs of Monsey, N.Y., and Lakewood, N.J., a year ago when word got out about a cost-cutting move by Kraft Foods, the new parent company of Stella D'Oro. Kraft had decided to use a less expensive, milk-infused chocolate, which meant that Stella D'Oro cookies could no longer be eaten after meat. But last week the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, the nation's largest certifier of kosher products, let it be known that Kraft had rescinded the plan. The senior manager for communications in Kraft's biscuit division, Elisabeth Wenner, confirmed a turnabout, saying that Stella D'Oro had not actually shifted to dairy production, but had simply made a labeling change in anticipation of doing so. That change, she said, has been ''placed on hold.'' Although Ms. Wenner would not reveal the reasons for the initial move or for the more recent one, rabbis at the Orthodox Union said the company had bowed to complaints from its own delivery people that the cookies were stagnating on the shelves of supermarkets in Orthodox neighborhoods. The buzz that followed Kraft's reversal was intense. Yaakov Kornreich, 56, of Flatbush, a father of five with five grandchildren, sent e-mail messages with the news to friends, including a businessman in Cleveland and the principal of a day school in Los Angeles, cities where the cookies are also available. Mr. Kornreich was delighted that he would be able to have his Swiss Fudge cookies again. ''They're addictive'' he said. ''They should come with a surgeon general's warning.'' .... Hundreds of mainstream American companies have found it profitable in recent decades to have their foods rabbinically supervised, and the Orthodox Union alone lets 230,000 product labels made by 2,500 companies use its seal, according to Rabbi Yosef Luban, executive rabbinic coordinator of its kashrut division. But the relationship with Stella D'Oro is among the older ones, going back to 1958. Orthodox Jews like the fact that the company's cookies can be easily found in general supermarkets or Midtown Manhattan groceries close to their place of work. Serving them as a dessert after Sabbath lunch, which almost always includes meat, has become something of a custom in many homes. And even the ultra-Orthodox, who will shun rabbinically approved dairy cookies unless the milk used has been given extra supervision, will eat Stella D'Oro. The Stella D'Oro Biscuit Company, whose anisette biscotti send a familiar fragrance through the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx and other company bakery sites around the country, was taken over by Nabisco Foods in 1992. In December 2000, Nabisco was itself bought by Kraft Foods. On the savings scale, the decision to substitute dairy chocolate for the more expensive pareve type in the Stella D'Oro line was trivial, but the fallout was large, not only among the Orthodox. The lactose-intolerant also look for the pareve label. Mr. Kornreich, a freelance writer who does the family shopping, said he spotted a Stella D'Oro deliveryman in a Flatbush supermarket a couple of months ago and asked him, ''Do you guys know how much business you're losing?'' ''Boy, do we ever!'' he remembered the deliveryman replying. The Stella D'Oro labels, featuring an OU-D, for Orthodox Union Dairy, rather than the longtime OU-P, for Orthodox Union Pareve, were changed far in advance of the recipe so kosher consumers could become accustomed to the idea that soon they could no longer eat the cookies with meat, rabbis for the Orthodox Union said. But as a result of the reaction, said Rabbi Yosef H. Goldberg, a rabbinic coordinator at the Orthodox Union's kashrut division, ''they now want to get the word out that the products never were anything but pareve, and they're still pareve.'' Ms. Wenner of Kraft said that the Swiss Fudge cookies would be relabeled as pareve immediately. |
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