Corn Flakes and responsa: the Manchester Beth Din and the MK mark

Pour a bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, squeeze out some Heinz Ketchup or unwrap a Fisherman’s Friend, and you may be holding a product certified by a rabbinical court in the north of England. The Manchester Beth Din and its MK mark reach well beyond Manchester’s own Jewish community. This is the third article in our series on the people behind the symbols on your shopping.

Who is behind the MK?

The Manchester Beth Din, in Hebrew Beis Din Tzedek Manchester, is the rabbinical court of the city’s Jewish community. Its certification arm is known as Manchester Kashrus, or simply MK, and it is operated as MBD Kosher Certification Services Ltd. MK certifies retail products, and also the ingredients that manufacturers rely on: enzymes, flavourings, oils and dairy ingredients.

From shechita board to Beth Din

The organisation’s roots lie in meat rather than in factories. The Manchester Shechita Board held its first meeting on 24 January 1892, and a full Beth Din followed in 1902. Certification of local manufacturers came much later: in 1965 Dayan Yitzchok Yaakov Weiss and Dayan Krausz began supervising food producers in the area, and that work grew into the MK service we know today.

Dayan Weiss is a central figure in this story. The author of the responsa Minchas Yitzchok, he served as senior dayan in Manchester from the late 1940s until 1970, and MK says it still follows his kosher policies. He later moved to Jerusalem and in 1979 became head of the Edah HaChareidis, an authority we will meet at the end of this series.

Like many institutions, the Beth Din has seen its share of change. In 2004 Rabbi Osher Westheim, who had headed its kashrut department, left to found the stricter Badatz Igud Harabbonim. In 2019, after a number of resignations, a consortium of local rabbis took over oversight of the Beth Din, according to the Jewish Chronicle.

Inside the world’s largest cereal plant

The MK’s best-known partnership is with Kellogg’s at Trafford Park, described in 2012 as the largest cereal factory in the world. That year, 31 of the 99 products made there were MK-certified. MK rabbis may arrive for unannounced spot-checks, and kosher and halal inspectors sometimes work side by side on the same site. It is a reminder that kosher supervision is not a one-off approval but an ongoing relationship with the factory.

The MK publishes no overall count of the products or factories it certifies, but the brands it names give a sense of its reach: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Fisherman’s Friend, Heinz Ketchup and Sun-Pat.

What the MK standard means

• Policy: the MK follows the kosher policies laid down by Dayan Weiss, the Minchas Yitzchok.
• Ingredients: it certifies the building blocks of food production, such as enzymes, flavourings, oils and dairy ingredients, as well as finished products.
• Spot-checks: its rabbis may visit certified factories without notice.

How to check a product

The Manchester Beth Din offers several resources for shoppers and households:

• The MK Retail product list, which sets out the retail products it certifies.
• The MK app, available on Google Play.
• A luach, the Jewish calendar.
• An infestation guide, with advice on checking food for insects.

If you are not sure about a product, the list or the app is the place to start, rather than relying on what the packaging shows.

Three things you might not know

1. The dayan who laid the foundations of the MK later led the Edah HaChareidis in Jerusalem, becoming its head in 1979.
2. At Kellogg’s Trafford Park, kosher and halal inspectors sometimes work side by side.
3. The organisation began in 1892 as a shechita board, ten years before it became a full Beth Din.

On The Kosher Shop, every food seller tells us which kashrut authority supervises their products, and we check the certificate before their shop opens. Next in this series: Shechita UK, and the story of Britain’s kosher meat since 1804.

Sources: Manchester Beth Din: The Beth Din; Manchester Beth Din: The MK; Wikipedia: Yitzchok Yaakov Weiss; JTA, 2020; The Jewish Chronicle, 1 July 2019; The Jewish Chronicle, 20 September 2012.