Like many food companies born post–Omnivore’s Dilemma, KOL Foods is driven as much by philosophical imperative as by corporate self-interest. It all began in 2007, when Devora Kimelman-Block, a Maryland mother of four, wanted to feed her family grass-fed, humanely raised kosher meat and realized none was available.
Kimelman-Block had kept a vegetarian kitchen for 15 years, because she couldn’t find meat that allowed her family to both observe kosher dietary law and avoid flesh from factory-farmed animals. But as more and more nonkosher sources for ethically raised, pastured meat began appearing, Kimelman-Block saw no reason why kosher Jews shouldn’t have options, too. So she formed partnerships with a local farmer, a kosher slaughterhouse, and a Washington, D.C., synagogue; coined the name KOL for “Kosher, Organic, Local”; and sent out an email to her friends and synagogue members advertising glatt kosher, organically raised, local, grass-fed beef.
“I thought I’d do it for family and friends as a nice little hobby,” Kimelman-Block says. “But I put up this little Web site and all of a sudden I get people coming from Pennsylvania to D.C. to get my meat.” Her second email yielded sales of more than 2,400 pounds of steaks, roasts, and ground beef to members of 14 area synagogues, from Reform to Orthodox. In 2008, KOL became an LLC and now ships specialty beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, and duck to customers nationwide.
Kimelman-Block realized that she’d found a hole in the market, one that was growing as more kosher Jews began to question where their meat was coming from. “I think ultimately what we’ve really been able to do, which is very tricky, is to enable people to actualize their modern and ancient values,” she says.
Over the past decade, the kosher food industry has boomed. According to the Mintel market research firm, sales reached $12.5 billion in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, marking a 64 percent increase from 2003. The rise was driven in part by nonkosher consumers who view kosher foods, which are prepared under strict religious supervision, as safer and cleaner than their conventional counterparts. Even so, the kosher industry has been slow to hop on the organic/sustainable bandwagon, creating the perfect opportunity for KOL to flourish.
Although Kimelman-Block founded KOL right before the nation’s economy went south, ultimately her timing couldn’t have been better. In May 2008, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents raided Agriprocessors, the largest glatt kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant in the United States.
The Postville, Iowa, facility had previously faced allegations of animal mistreatment, pollution, and violation of labor laws. The raid was one of the largest in U.S. history, and resulted in the arrests of nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers, child labor charges, and a 27-year prison sentence for financial fraud for a plant manager. The debacle, which was covered extensively in the general press, created a crisis of confidence among observant Jews, who had always viewed kosher meat as both clean and ethical. (Dietary law dictates that animals must be in good health and must be slaughtered as quickly as possible by a shochet, or Jewish ritual slaughterer.)
The Agriprocessors scandal “moved the conversation about Jewish ethics in meat production to the front pages of The New York Times and the forefront of Jewish institutions,” says Sue Fishkoff, the author of Kosher Nation, a 2010 book on the kosher food industry. “Since the raid, every Hebrew school, every day school, every Hillel, and every synagogue talks about what their kosher policy is.” She credits KOL with inspiring “what looks to be a fast-growing field”: Since Kimelman-Block launched her business, smaller companies like Mitzvah Meat, Grow & Behold, and Kosher Conscience have sprung up around the country.
The challenges Kimelman-Block faced in starting KOL were substantial and in some cases unique. On top of the logistics of simply getting meat from the processors’ freezers into her customers’ hands, there was the issue of getting meat to the freezer itself. For her poultry, for example, Kimelman-Block wanted the chickens to be slaughtered and processed on the farms where they were raised. But since kosher law forbids the scalding of chickens to remove their feathers—a routine practice in conventional processing—she initially wasn’t able to offer poultry.
Another compromise involved the company’s name: The “L” in KOL stands for “local,” but Kimelman-Block quickly discovered that because she works with only a handful of kosher slaughterhouses, the ideal of raising and slaughtering all the meat close to where it’s sold would have to be sacrificed if she wanted to make her meat available nationally. “So in the list of priorities, the local thing had to be secondary,” she says.
When Kimelman-Block started out, she learned the ropes from Julie Bolton, the owner of Groff’s Content, a livestock farm in Rocky Ridge, Maryland. Bolton remembers Kimelman-Block’s unrealistic first request for meat that could be ready for Passover: Kimelman-Block didn’t understand that the animals, which hadn’t yet been “finished” on spring grass weren’t ready for slaughter. Another issue, Bolton recalls, was finding a good kosher butcher. “The first guy put the meat in baggies and froze it,” she says, recalling the meager, improperly butchered beef packed in flimsy plastic bags rather than vacuum-sealed. In time, Kimelman-Block got up to speed and found reliable butchers, too.
KOL’s business continues to grow: It now ships to customer buying clubs (organized groups that place a minimum of 10 to 18 orders), which have the meat delivered to a central drop-off point in cities from Boston to San Francisco. Yet, where the overall kosher meat supply is concerned, KOL’s product represents a drop in the bucket.
“I hate to say it, but this hasn’t yet taken the normative kosher-keeping community by storm,” says Rabbi Josh Katzan, who oversees KOL’s New York City buying club and has been encouraging members of his Upper West Side congregation to sign up for the club’s Passover order. Part of the problem, he says, is that KOL’s meat is viewed as a luxury—like regular organic, grass-fed meat, it costs about 30 percent more than conventional feed-lot-raised meat. And part of it is human nature. Katzan, who experienced his own philosophical awakening after reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, says, like many people, his community is supportive of the ideas behind companies like KOL, but many have yet to “take the leap” to put those ideas into practice.
KOL’s greatest impact may lie not in getting the kosher community at large to buy its meat, but in provoking these consumers to consider how their ethics square with the food they put in their mouths. As Katzan sees it, this kind of ethical consumerism may not “move the whole industry dramatically, but I think it will become more and more normal.”
Rebecca Flint Marx lives in New York City and has written about food and other topics for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, CHOW.com, and New York magazine.