Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Embattled Kosher Meat Giant Fights Back With P.R. Offensive

Read an updated version of this article here.

Battered by widespread criticism over its labor practices and facing calls for a boycott of its products, the operator of the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse appears to be gearing up for a major public-relations blitz.

Agriprocessors has hired 5W Public Relations, a New York-based P.R. powerhouse that represents clients ranging from hip-hop stars to Fortune 500 companies, as well as a number of major Jewish organizations and Israeli political figures. The beleaguered kosher-meat company’s representatives have also organized a community meeting in New York City to counter concerns about the firm that have circulated throughout the Jewish community, blogs and the press.

Agriprocessors has faced criticism for the past two years over the labor conditions at its massive Postville, Iowa, plant. Those criticisms have sharpened in the wake of a massive federal raid on the slaughterhouse that last month, in the course of which nearly 400 illegal immigrant employees were arrested.

In the wake of the raid, there has been a growing backlash against Agriprocessors in the Jewish community. This past week, representatives from Agriprocessors met with organizers from Uri L’Tzedek, a liberal Orthodox organization that has called for a boycott of Agriprocessors until the company introduces labor reforms.

Juda Engelmayer, who is handling the Agriprocessors account for 5W, said that Agriprocessors had hired his firm within the past two weeks to deal with marketing, but he declined to go into greater detail about strategy or the types of issues his firm would handle.

Menachem Lubinksy, CEO of the kosher industry consulting firm Lubicom and a spokesman for Agriprocessors, told the Forward that he expected 5W to deal with negative publicity and blogs. Asked to confirm this, Engelmayer said 5W’s role is still undefined.

Meanwhile, Lubinsky’s firm has organized a meeting for June 24 in midtown Manhattan to present Agriprocessors’s case. According to an e-mail publicizing the event, the topics discussed will include the potential for a kosher meat shortage and “What can be done to stop the slander and vilifications against Agriprocessors?” Among those slated to appear, according to the e-mail, are “local community activists from Postville” and “kosher food industry leaders.” Lubinsky declined to reveal the identities of the activists and industry leaders.

Rabbi Morris Allen, leader of the Conservative movement’s effort to reform labor practices in the kosher food industry and one of the most prominent critics of Agriprocessors, said he worried that the public-relations push was a sign that Agriprocessors was more focused on going after its critics than about changing its practices.

“It appears that sometimes people’s best defense is not to look at themselves to make change but rather to attack people who are simply calling for a higher standard to be used in the production of kosher food,” Allen said.

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.