Mike-sell’s employees with a few of their 29 kosher products (L to R): Marketing Dir. Luke Mapp, Plant Manager John Hines, Purchasing/Regulatory Manager Jennifer Terrell, Lab Technician Laura Trego, and Operations Exec. V.P. David J. Smith

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

Not many businesses want their product to be a best-kept secret. That’s especially true of Mike-sell’s Potato Chip Company, the Dayton-based snack food manufacturer. The 101-year-old family-owned company — the oldest potato chip manufacturer in the United States — is always looking to expand its distribution, which now runs about a 300-mile radius from its Leo Street plant.

But few in the Dayton area’s Jewish community know that most Mike-sell’s products are certified kosher pareve and kosher dairy by Quality Kosher Supervision of Canton.

Quality Kosher’s rabbinic administrator, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, began supervising Mike-sell’s products 18 years ago; since then, Mike-sell’s has used a generic K on its packaging, not always in the same place on its packages.

“We were the first ones to begin the kosher program with Mike-sell’s,” Spero said. “It’s been consecutive every year. The company has always done what they’re supposed to do in order to satisfy our kosher standards.”

“People have the right to be concerned with their religious views as well as their health concerns, and at Mike-sell’s we strive to provide the solution for all,” said Luke Mapp, marketing director of Mike-sell’s and a great-grandson of the company’s founder.

Spero’s Quality Kosher Supervision also certifies food manufacturers in the region including Nickles Bread in Cincinnati, a Klosterman Baking Company plant in Springfield, and Robert Rothschild Farm in Urbana.

Those products carry Quality Kosher’s trademarked hechsher (kosher symbol), a Q with the Hebrew letter kaf inside it.

Mike-sell’s is considering changes to its packaging. On a conference call with Spero on Jan. 14, David J. Smith, Mike-sell’s executive vice president of operations, asked the rabbi, “from a marketing perspective, would we improve our ability to sell our product if we had your trademark on it, to the Jewish community that we service?”

“It would help,” Spero said, “because there are some individuals who like to know that there’s an official kosher symbol on the package, because that implies that it’s authorized, as opposed to someone just putting a K on there, which they really shouldn’t do unless the product is kosher.”

Spero explained that when kosher consumers see the generic K, it doesn’t have the same “gravitas” as the trademarked hechsher.

Sue Fishkoff, author of the 2010 book Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority, writes that the generic K was conceived in the 1920s by marketing executive Joseph Jacobs, “to give manufacturers of kosher products a symbol that kosher consumers would recognize, but that any rabbi could take as his own mark.”

The problem, Fishkoff explains, was that the K symbol was never trademarked, “so anyone can use it, one reason why it grows less popular each year.”

The generic K, Spero said, is not as beneficial today.

“People today do look for specific symbols,” he said. “It’s OK to do it, but people are more comfortable when they see a specific kosher symbol because, after all, for example, ours is trademarked. And you can’t put a trademark symbol on a package unless you’re authorized by the organization that owns the trademark.”

At its Dayton plant and headquarters, all Mike-sell’s products are kosher except cheddar, sour cream and smoked bacon flavored varieties of potato chips (the bacon flavoring is artificial).

At Mike-sell’s Indianapolis plant, which manufactures pretzels and puff corn, all products are kosher except cheese-flavored puff corn and cheese curls.

Spero inspects the plants a few times a year and sends representatives to the plants for a total of six or seven visits per plant each year.

Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin

His kosher inspector for Mike-sell’s Dayton plant is Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin of Chabad of Greater Dayton. In addition to Klatzkin’s work for Spero, he manages kosher supervision for 15 factories across Ohio under OK certification.
“There’s no question he’s an absolutely reliable guy,” Klatzkin said of Spero. “His standards are high. It’s a fairly widespread hechsher around Ohio.”

The display of a trademarked hechsher on a certified product, Klatzkin said, is a marketing decision. Although kosher certification organizations would like their customers to use their hechshers, Klatzkin said, “that’s not our business. The only thing that as a certifier, you just make sure they’re not claiming something in your name that’s greater than they’re authorized to claim.”

The challenge of kosher supervision, Klatzkin said, is one of organization. There are more than 1,000 kosher certifying agencies around the world.

“No one I know is on top of all of them or even a large percentage of them,” he says. “Everybody’s very reticent to speak for something unless they’ve gone through the whole agency themself. I’ll vouch for the places I’m at.”