 |
Food Marketers Target Non-Jews
By Yochi Dreazen - THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
KOSHER - food marketers increasingly are targeting non-Jewish customers, tinkering with their ads to suggest that their products offer earthly benefits as well as heavenly ones. And in this health-conscious age, the pitch is falling on receptive ears.
Sales of kosher products are projected to jump almost 10% to $50 billion this year compared with 1998. Once confined to smaller stores in largely Jewish neighborhoods, kosher foods and beverages now are in about 18,000 of the nation's 30,000 supermarkets, including big national chains. And non-Jewish customers now make up a significant majority of the market for kosher goods, says Integrated Marketing Communications, a New York kosher-food marketing company.
"A fair amount of adult non-Jewish customers value the kosher certification and look for it," says Scott Bussen, a spokesman for Philip Morris's Miller Lite, which recently added visible kosher certification to its cans and bottles. "This is clearly something that is gaining momentum." Miller is one of a string of mainstream food producers -- others include Anheuser-Busch, Nabisco, Keebler and Mars -- that have sought kosher certification in recent years.
The non-Jewish market for kosher food ranges from Muslims, whose own dietary restrictions are very similar to those of observant Jews, to vegetarians and lactose-intolerant customers, who are attracted to varieties of kosher food that are free of animal or dairy byproducts. Others are drawn by a mistaken belief that kosher food has been blessed by a rabbi (rabbis merely inspect the process). But the biggest portion of the market belongs to those who consider kosher food -- which must be certified by a rabbi and meet stringent standards -- to be healthier and purer than its mainstream counterparts.
Empire Kosher, for example, targets a broader market with recently unveiled new ads that declare: "Compared to kosher, ordinary chicken doesn't have a chance." The print ads assert that kosher "is more than rabbis blessing chicken. It's an incredibly strict process that produces the cleanest, healthiest, best-tasting chicken you can buy."
"The kosher-conscious Jewish market is growing only slightly, and doesn't offer much opportunity for new sales," says Empire's president and CEO, Michael Strear. "That's why we're so interested in the crossover marketing to non-Jewish customers." The company says observant Jews made up only 25% of its $120 million in sales last year.
Manischewitz, one of the oldest kosher-food producers, plans a new ad campaign to appeal to a wider, mainstream audience, says Dan Berkowitz, a product manager. "Telling Jewish customers that we make kosher food may not be the best thing for us to do, because everyone already knows that," he says. Instead, the ads will "tell non-Jewish shoppers that eating kosher food has tangible health benefits."
Hebrew National, part of the National Foods division of ConAgra Inc., was one of the first kosher companies to make a concerted push to attract non-Jewish customers, running irreverent television, radio and print ads under the tagline "We answer to a higher authority." The ads emphasize what the company says is the higher quality of its kosher-meat products. Hebrew National, which had sales in excess of $100 million last year, now estimates that nearly 75% of its customers are non-Jews. " Kosher is the symbol of high quality to many non-Jews," says National Foods Executive Vice President Martin Silver.
Such pitches do pose a risk. "The concern is that some Orthodox Jews might think that the integrity of our kosher products won't be as great," says Empire's Mr. Strear. "That's happened before with other kosher companies that went mainstream and then lost their certification."
But for now, even kosher companies that feel as if they haven't fully saturated the Jewish market are eager to think bigger. "Gaining part of the non-Jewish market would be the ultimate seal of approval," says Avi Fertig, a spokesman for Royal Wine Co., which sold about $100 million of kosher wines and grape juices last year. "These are people interested in quality, not just certification."
|
|
