Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

Loblaw’s COR Certification

Loblaw, Canada’s largest food retailer, has announced that it will only be dealing with a single kashrut supervision organization from now on when it comes to its store brands. According to a Canadian Jewish News report, the company, which operates more than 1,000 corporate and franchised supermarkets, stores and warehouse-type outlets across Canada, said that going forward, it would work only with the Kashruth Council of Canada and it’s COR designation.

Until now, Loblaws has had ten different kashrut symbols on the packaging of its brands, such as President’s Choice, No name, and Blue Menu. The plan is for the products to continue to be supervised by the same heksher-granting agencies as before (including OU, the most widely recognized kashrut designation), but to have only COR printed on their labels.

Kashruth Council spokesman Richard Rabkin said that all ten current hekshers met COR standards. If another agency wanted to certify a Loblaw store brand, the Kashruth Council would have to ascertain that it met COR standards. If it did not, that agency would be required to work with Kashruth Council to come up to COR standards, and if it did not, Loblaw would make the ultimate decision as to whether to accept the product or not.

Despite claims that this new consolidation will lead to uniformity in packaging and expedited manufacturing without any additional cost to anyone involved — including the consumer — other heksher-ing agencies are somewhat wary. Rabbi Saul Emanuel, executive director of the Jewish Community Council of Montreal, which oversees the MK certification that until now could be found on many Loblaw store brand products told the CJN that he is adopting a wait-and-see approach.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.