LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
How COCA-COLA
Prompted the
Advent of
PASSOVER- FRIENDLY
Food Companies
BY ALINA DAIN SHARON | JNS.ORG
I Rabbi Tobias Geffen
A kosher-for-Passover
bottle of Coca-Cola,
distinguished from
ordinary Coca-Cola
bottles by its yellow cap.

Mark H. Anbinder via Flickr.com
14 APRIL 7, 2016
n the 1930s, Rabbi Tobias
Geffen of Atlanta began to
investigate the hidden ingre-
dients inside mass-produced
foods and to evaluate whether
those ingredients conflict with
kosher laws. He then set a prece-
dent by getting The Coca-Cola
Company to make a kosher-for-
Passover version of its soft drink,
convincing the company to sub-
stitute the grain alcohol used in
the processing of its drink to
alcohol derived from molasses.

Geffen’s achievement was a re-
sponse to the fact that in the 1920s,
“Coke became an incredibly pop-
ular beverage in America,” and
“Jews adopted a custom of making
it available to children during the
Passover seder in lieu of wine,” said
historian Roger Horowitz —
whose book, “Kosher USA: How
Coke Became Kosher and Other
Tales of Modern Food,” will be
published by Columbia University
Press this month.

This step by Coca-Cola
stood out at a time when few
mainstream food manufactur-
ers were making kosher-for-
Passover products.

“Coke was an enormous con-
sumer product in the 1930s, and
jealously guarded its formula,”
Horowitz said. Much of the
company’s decision, he ex-
plained, rested on its confidence
in Geffen that he would not re-
veal the drink’s secret ingredi-
ents, and the episode was “an
enormous asset in persuading
other conventional food firms to
secure kosher certification.”
Geffen personally issued a
kosher-for-Passover certification
on Coke, eventually passing the
baton to another rabbi. Mean-
while, the founder of the Ortho-
dox Union (OU) and its kosher-
certification labeling, Abraham
Goldstein, was another figure
dedicated to the science of figur-
ing out what’s inside foods and
whether those ingredients are ac-
ceptable for Passover as well as
for kosher-observant consump-
tion year-round. He was partic-
ularly interested in ice cream,
surveying its manufacturers to
determine what they were put-
ting inside their products and ul-
timately deciding that Breyers ice
cream, for instance, is acceptable
JEWISH EXPONENT
to eat during Passover.

But Goldstein was simply re-
viewing foods as they existed at
the time. The fact that Coca-Cola
chose to make a distinct version
of its drink for Passover, therefore,
was a big exception.

Rabbi Moshe Elefant, Chief
Operating Officer of the OU’s
kosher-certifying arm, said that
subsequently, the OU began to
certify Coke for Passover around
1989-1990, after the company re-
moved high fructose corn syrup
from its Passover drink and re-
placed it with sugar. These bot-
tles are known today for their
distinct yellow caps.

When the OU certifies a
product as generally kosher, it is
typically sufficient for rabbinical
supervisors to make occasional
visits to a company to make sure
that the product is being pro-
duced in accordance with kosher
standards. When it comes to
Passover, however, making a
product that is kosher for the
holiday requires full-time rab-
binical supervision. One other
food that illustrates this situation
is quinoa, a type of grain that was
only in recent years certified as
both kosher and kosher for
Passover by the OU.

“One of the staples of the
kosher diet now is sushi. But
there’s a problem with sushi on
Passover because sushi is made
with rice, and Jews of Ashkenazi
descent don’t eat rice on
Passover. How are you going to
survive eight to nine days with-
out sushi? You make it with
quinoa,” Elefant said.

After many public requests
for the OU to certify quinoa, rab-
bis needed to make their decision
based on ancient texts and rules
that were written in an era when
quinoa did not exist.

“After much deliberation and
discussion, we determined that
quinoa is not part of that legume
family. Then we sent a rabbi to
the mountains of Peru, where
quinoa grows and is packaged,”
where he needed to see if “the
quinoa is packaged or processed
in the same machinery or equip-
ment as non-kosher for Passover
products, [which] would for lack
of a better word contaminate the
quinoa,” Elefant explained.

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