Kosherfest founder Menachem Lubinsky reflects on the explosive rise of the kosher food industry

Photos: Jeff Zorabedian

Kosherfest, the kosher food industry’s enormous business-to-business show, has been held yearly since its launch in 1989, until now. There were many unhappy faces in kosherland when Diversified Communications, the company behind the event, announced in May that it would be discontinuing the show.

Kosherfest was a foodie’s paradise, with hundreds of booths showcasing products old and new. Anybody who was anybody attended the show: representatives from kosher companies and supermarkets, entrepreneurs launching new products, bloggers, Insta influencers, cookbook authors, politicians shaking hands. Having navigated its crowded aisles a few times myself, it struck me as resembling nothing so much as a vast beehive, designed to create an extraordinary amount of buzz.

Kosherfest began small, then grew bigger. And bigger. And then finally, the kosher world grew so big that Kosherfest collapsed under its own weight, a victim of its own success.

According to Menachem Lubinsky, the owner of Lubicom Communications and a partner in Kosherfest since its inception, the disappearance of Kosherfest is simply a result of the kosher food industry’s astronomical growth, and isn’t really bad news at all. These days, you don’t need a kosher trade show to discover exciting new products, he explains. “The emergence of enormous kosher supermarkets throughout the Jewish world means that consumers can discover new products right on the shelves of their groceries,” he elaborates. “Once upon a time, we had only small mom-and-pop groceries. There was only room for one or two brands of mayonnaise on the shelf. In today’s mega-supermarkets, there’s room for 15 brands.”

Cue the music for When Zaidy Was Young as we take a trip back to the “olden days” of the 1980s, when there were only two kinds of kosher mayo, when kosher wine meant sacramental, such as Tokay and Malaga, and when Kosherfest was nothing more than the gleam in the eye of a traveling salesman from Roslyn, Long Island.