Kosher consumers have long been accustomed to passing up food courts, restaurants and cafeterias offering everything but kosher food.
Now, thanks to robotic retailing, these consumers are relishing hot kosher food at airports, hospitals, stadiums and shopping malls where brown-bagging was once their only dining option.
All food in the Hot Nosh and Kosher Cart vending machines is glatt kosher. In the two years since its launch, Kosher Vending Industries (KVI) has proven the scope of the market for away-from-home kosher food. With more than 100 machines in high-profile venues, its accounts range from JFK Airport and the New York University Medical Center to the Meadowlands sports complex.
The company’s founders, Doron Fetman and Alan Cohnen, report that word is spreading fast, driving demand for placements in high-volume amusement parks, hotels, hospitals, schools, large office complexes and sporting and concert venues. The kosher vending pioneers and their staff operate their vending machines exclusively in the greater New York City area.
“We’ve proven that the need for kosher food is immense in public locations in the New York area. We can easily see 200 vends per game at a stadium,” said Fetman. “We have a bank of six machines to meet the demand in the international terminal at JFK Airport. And calls are coming in from across the country from major venues that want the machines.”
Anthony Mendicino, owner of a 7-Eleven in Monsey, NY, says kosher vending machines installed in his store provide the hassle-free solution to serving the growing Orthodox Jewish community with a quick, hot meal.
Anthony says that he struggled for years to find a practical way to bring hot kosher food to his patrons. The chain is a leader among convenience stores in selling food prepared on site, but Mendicino could not find a realistic way of maintaining the stringent cooking, storage and staffing requirements and the close rabbinical supervision needed to offer a genuine kosher menu.
He finally found a solution in Hot Nosh and Kosher Cart. “It brings customers into the store. We’re the perfect fit—I have the customers’ KVI needs, and they have the food I need. Customers come in and go directly to the machines,” he said.
“We give a commission to the location, so they can profit from consumers they never reached,” Fetman explained. “And they finally have a way to give kosher customers access to the food they want.”
“Everyone wants to be able to serve every potential customer they can reach, but they’re missing kosher consumers. Our machines are the easiest way to fill that niche. We maintain and service the machines; they don’t have to worry about it, while they share the profit.”
As a kosher consumer himself, Fetman recognized the need for accessible kosher meals on the go. And with a dozen years’ experience working in his family’s kosher catering business, he understood the logistics of complying with kosher standards from preparation of food through delivery to the customer.
His first attempt at reaching the mobile kosher consumer with grab-and-go meals was a kosher food concession at Giants stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands sports center. “I saw the pitfalls, the spoilage and staffing issues, and the limited room for growth,” he recalled. “Kosher concessions made sense, but not in that setting. I sold the business to a partner and decided that if I could get the chef, the kitchen and the cashier into one box, there would be unlimited growth potential; the sky would be the limit.”
He approached Cohnen, a longtime friend whose experience in the corporate world and recent sale of his cellular technology business to a public company qualified him as a prospective partner. He immediately grasped the concept and believed strongly in it, and Kosher Vending Industries was launched.
Their first step was identifying available machines that could reliably and attractively meet their vision of vending kosher hot dogs and hot meals. The ideal candidates were KRh Thermal Systems’s Hot Choice automated diner, which they branded as their Hot Nosh machine (it vends dairy and other non-meat selections), and LHD Vending’s HD3000 hot dog vender, which serves as the company’s “Kosher Cart.”
They then searched out the most appealing frozen kosher food items already produced for retail and food service, and refined their menu by selecting the ones that would provide the best taste and texture when rethermalized by KRh’s combination of microwave and hot air technology.
Manufactured for KVI under private label, the food for the Hot Nosh machine is packaged in vendible trays that bear the kosher seal. The frankfurters for the Kosher Cart are individually packaged for distribution, handling and storage. Unwrapped inside the novel machine, the frank is cooked automatically using the latest infrared grilling technology. The bun, packaged separately, is warmed while the frankfurter is being grilled. When the process is complete, the vender inserts the frank into the bun and vends the hot dog. The serving-tray is the package that originally contained the bun.
After extensive testing to make certain that the finished products satisfied the mutual standards of both the operators and manufacturers, KVI signed 20-year exclusive agreements with each equipment maker to be the sole providers of kosher food through the machines.
With an average $3 vend price, the Hot Nosh menu of kosher non-meat items (often collectively called, for convenience, “dairy”) includes Sicilian-style pizza, mozzarella sticks, potato knishes, onion rings and vegetarian cutlets.
They are preparing to roll out their recently expanded hot food menu to address a wider range of dining occasions. Soon-to-be launched options include baked ziti, macaroni and cheese, breakfast burritos, filled pocket sandwiches, quiches, blintzes and two desserts: a brownie and an apple strudel.
The kosher inspection emblem on all products, bearing the names of the supervising rabbis, is well-recognized by consumers as an assurance of full compliance to glatt kosher standards.
KVI has machine tests under way in select upstate New York Wal-Mart stores as well as at a ShopRite supermarket in New Jersey. The company’s first venture outside the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area is in Boston at historic Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. This project is demonstrating that KVI’s infrastructure can easily support expansion nationwide. Fetman and Cohnen are currently in talks with prospective operators for their machines in Philadelphia, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
