The Kosher Market

The kosher market is made up of two groups:

The classic kosher market, which has several characteristics:

  1. This market is limited to certain urban centers like New York, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal and Los Angeles.
  2. Most consumers are Jewish, and within this group, most are religious.
  3. Place of purchase is generally the specialty stores.
  4. These customers’ attitude is often that shopping kosher means being willing to pay more.
  5. The growth is modest as compared with population growth in other areas.

The new kosher market-the greater source for growth and which has several characteristics:

  1. A Jewish population made up of both religious and non-religious Jews, and a certain part of the market that is not Jewish.
  2. Place of purchase is usually the large chain stores (Albertsons, Ralphs, Trader Joes, Wal-Mart, etc.
  3. Consumers are in the higher socio-economic brackets and want to buy kosher products identical to parallel products in the general market.
  4. Most of growth in the U.S. kosher consumer market comes from this section of the customer base.

(The reason for kosher food’s high popularity among the middle-aged in particular stems from this age group’s awareness of the quality of the food they and their children eat. From the age of 30, a consumer’s ethnic identity expresses itself in his buying habits. Incidentally, Molosky revealed quite surprisingly that kosher food purchases decrease after the age of 56).