Leading candy manufacturer, Jelly Belly, switches kosher certification to the leader, OU Kosher

company started about 1869 couple of Brothers immigrated from Germany they started selling candy and ice cream about 1898 or so they discovered candy corn in the 1960s one of the brothers started up this division out here and then in 76 the family bought the Jelly Belly recipe and the rest is kind of History most folks know us for the beans obviously the the gourmet jelly beans with all the true to life uh really EX in flavors but uh we also make a line of gummy items and we have uh probably the best OU certified gummies on the market anywhere but again beans are what we're best known for people ask all the time how many beans we make and um what we like to tell them uh we make uh enough beans to go around the earth five times every year we actually started our koser certification with another organization and we were kosher ized uh quite some time before we came to the OU we we came to recognize though that the OU is a much broader accepted certification and represents a class organization and so we wanted to have that that class and that quality that's associated with ou associated with the class and the quality that is jelly Val the OU is a lot more stringent than our previous certification process is a a lot more things that we had to consider if you could go this way and get to a result results or you could go this way and get to the results both avenues for achieving the desired results were explained to us so we could choose the one that was most comfortable for us uh and that that helped make the uh certification process uh just be easy and kind of uh um painless if you will the OU has been very responsive uh a lot of the communications we have with them are online so if we are developing a new product we submit it to them and before we even start our R&D we we know that they have accepted the product it happens very quickly we have quick access to the information right away we know when things are approved there's any questions we can call there's always somebody we can talk to I mean it's been really easy to get things through the system things that we pride ourselves on is our Innovation we're always developing new flavors new textures new products and to be able to get that out there before somebody else gets it out there is very important so U direct supports that from the standpoint that can get in get out get what you need really quickly there were a lot of factors that went into the decision to choose the OU and we felt like that brand would help us with our international business as well because we could benefit from that with the expansion of our product internationally we're in 80 countries but that changes by the hour uh even though we pursued it to make sure that we had the Jewish customers we found that we've gathered other customers who like and appreciate the fact that there are certain standards that have to be followed to maintain that certification so it's had benefits for us that we hadn't even anticipated the U symbol is a quality symbol and people associate that with something that is above what is average it's been a great relationship for us with ou we are very proud to be associated with ou and it's very obvious that the OU wants us to be successful and it it does feel more like a partnership than it is a a a client customer kind of relationship we see value and we're the symbol proudly I foresee us being a members of the OU Community for a long long time