How kosher is that Frappuccino?
HOW ONE ORTHODOX JEW is helping his co-religionists reconcile their favourite Starbucks beverages with strict dietary laws
Uri Ort knows more about Starbucks than just about anyone else alive, but he will not name a favourite Starbucks. He will not say where he first had his favourite Starbucks drink, the tall one-pump Breve Vanilla Latte, nor where in summertime he prefers to pick up his favourite Starbucks cold drink, the orange mango banana Vivanno.
“I have relationships with many Starbucks stores,” said Ort, a 26-year-old Orthodox Jew. “There really isn’t one specific store. That’s the fact. I’m friends with baristas in Texas, in Chicago, in Baltimore and in the New York and New Jersey area.”
Ort, an unmarried e-commerce manager who lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, runs kosherstarbucks.com. He is the leading amateur in the world of coffee kosherology (that’s what we’re calling it): the science of figuring out what is kosher, what traditional religious Jews may consume, at Starbucks.
Like nearly everyone else who is not Mormon, religious Jews need their coffee. On many blocks, in many cities, in the airport, on the turnpike, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, from San Francisco to Ashtabula, coffee very often means Starbucks coffee.
Coffee beans and hot water are kosher: They do not run afoul of the biblical prohibitions against foods like pork and shellfish. But Starbucks does offer such items, for instance, breakfast sandwiches with ham. And the carafes, knives and other implements can commingle in Starbucks sinks and washing machines, which means particles from, say, a non-kosher smoothie mix can contaminate a spoon used to skim foam off a latte.
The rules for what ingredients are kosher, and what keeps utensils kosher, are complicated. To help sort matters out, Ort and his younger brother, Teddy, started a website they say hundreds of thousands have consulted, to see what is permissible to eat and drink at the favourite coffee house in the U.S.
“We started the website in 2007,” Ort said, “because I’m a little bit obsessed with Starbucks, and I also have a strong interest in kosher. It started as a personal endeavour, to figure out what was kosher and what wasn’t. Eventually I had friends asking me, and I figured I would put it up on the web. It started small, and just grew.”
Ort was not always a Starbucks man. Growing up in Lakewood, N.J., he was partial to Dunkin’ Donuts.
“But then I spent some time in Israel,” he said. “And I got used to a much stronger coffee. And when I came back to America I had an issue with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.”
He began to stop into Starbucks, and became friends with some baristas around Lakewood. Eventually, his barista network grew – “A bunch of my Facebook friends are Starbucks baristas,” he said – and now that network helps his website stay current.
Ort helpfully marks all Starbucks products with either a green light or a red light. The Frappuccinos all get red lights. The Tazo teas, green lights. Hot chocolate, green light – but white hot chocolate, red light. The Vivanno smoothie? It depends on the flavour. Mocha drizzle on top – yes! Caramel drizzle, no. Yes to whipped cream. Ort is not the only macher in this game. Rabbi Sholem Fishbane, the kosher supervisor for the Chicago Rabbinical Council, spent more than two years stopping into Starbucks stores all over the world, researching his definitive 2011 document, “Guide to Starbucks Beverages.” “I’d say I visited 50-plus Starbucks,” Fishbane said, calling from his vacation house in the Catskills. “It’s safe to say I’ve been to three-quarters of the states. I’ve been to Japan.”
Fishbane’s paper is a thorough, painstaking document. For example, he discusses at length the Starbucks dishwasher, which uses 180-degree water – a reassuringly sanitary temperature, but bad for Starbucks’s kosher status, because it is considered hot enough to absorb nonkosher flavours into a pot.
And he gives permissible ratios for nonkosher ingredients in a kosher food: “Even though it is possible that a tiny bit of nonkosher grease might be on the rag used to wipe the steamer wands and that grease might end up in my steamed milk, the milk remains kosher because the volume of the milk is more than 60 times the volume of the grease.”
Fishbane is a full-time kosher supervisor, and his Starbucks visits were just side trips on his travels. Ort, by contrast, is part of the Starbucks community – and, he says, a more reliable guide than even some of the professionals.
“The large certifying agencies, such as the Star-k and the chicago rabbinical council, are far too quick to simply say beverages in Starbucks are not kosher,” Ort said. They are thus “keeping themselves safe while inconveniencing thousands of people, when in fact, according to Jewish law, many beverages are completely kosher.”
Ort is constantly answering questions emailed from around the world. Interested parties can get his regular email updates, for which there is a $3 suggested donation.
The email updates are necessary, he says, because the flow of Starbucks products never lets up. Web traffic is heaviest “whenever new drinks come out,” he says. And that is pretty much all the time.
Christmas beverages, holiday drinks – it’s a lot for a Jew to keep track of.