Supermarkets Get Kosher for Passover : Ready for Creamed-Style Shav or Gefilte Fish? Chains Step Up Promotion of Ethnic Holidays

Judy Aronson has carried out a special mission over the past week in preparation for the Passover holiday, which begins tonight.

She has inspected supermarkets, wine shops and kosher butcher shops in search of the makings of the perfect Passover meal. “I’ve been everywhere,” she said.

In recent years, however, supermarkets have been making Aronson’s Passover mission a lot easier, even if she still can’t find everything in one place.

Aronson and other shoppers looking for foods specially prepared for the Jewish holiday--foods commonly labeled Kosher for Passover in Hebrew and English--are finding improved selections. The big supermarkets have recognized the value in paying increasing attention to Passover, which marks the liberation of Jewish slaves from Egypt some 3,400 years ago.

‘A Market Necessity’

To some extent, that pattern is part of a “general trend toward better ethnic marketing,” said Steven Koff, president of the Southern California Grocers Assn. “We’re seeing marketing for Hispanic occasions and Chinese New Year.”

In Los Angeles, which has the second-largest Jewish community in the nation, with a population of about 500,000, the Passover trade is considered particularly important. In fact, said Kevin Davis, assistant vice president of sales and advertising for Ralphs Grocery, capturing that business is “a market necessity . . . much like Christmas and Easter.”

Grocers said the market for Passover foods isn’t growing only because the Jewish community is growing.

“There is that 25 to 35 age group that is returning to traditional values,” Koff explained. “They may not normally keep kosher but they will for Passover.”

To keep kosher for Passover, Jews must abstain from a larger-than-usual list of forbidden foods. Regular bread, in particular, is avoided during the holiday because, religious authorities explain, the Jews who fled from Egypt did not have time to prepare leavened bread. Many other foods are supposed to be specially prepared under religious supervision.

Central to the Passover celebration is the seder, an evening meal and ritual guided by a special prayer book known as the Haggadah. The seder includes the symbolic foods associated with the flight from Egypt, such as the roasted shank bone to symbolize the lamb sacrificed at the ancient temple.

Meals during the holiday also include traditional foods improvised over the years from the ingredients allowed during the holiday.

Creamed-Style Shav

Special Passover displays have appeared at supermarkets throughout Southern California. “There are expanded lines of products and they are more prominently displayed,” Koff said.

Shoppers have been buying everything from Israeli Rishon matzo (a cracker-like “bread” made with unleavened flour) to Rokeach creamed-style Shav (an Eastern European cold soup made with sorrel, or sourgrass) to Manischewitz Low Calorie Borscht. Not to mention specially prepared gefilte fish (a combination of whitefish and carp boiled in a fish stock), chocolate and carrot cake mixes and macaroons.

The traditional producers of kosher and kosher-style foods aren’t the only ones going after the Passover foods market. In certain cities--primarily in the Northeast--both Coca-Cola and Pepsi offer Passover soft drinks sweetened with sugar instead of the fructose corn syrup forbidden during Passover.

In other cases, when major supermarket chains moved into ethnic markets small neighborhood shops sometimes have suffered. But many Jews, particularly recent immigrants, remain drawn to the Fairfax district in West Los Angeles where several small kosher grocers and restaurants are clustered.

“It gives you a feeling of community. . . . My mother went to Fairfax (to shop this week) because it’s traditional,” said Aronson, a Westsider who is director of education and administration at Shir Chadash New Reform Congregation in Encino.

Special Promotions

Ralphs’ Davis said the supermarkets take special care to avoid offending kosher customers by mixing displays of kosher for Passover foods with non-kosher products. “We make sure all of our people have a full understanding of the holiday. We pass out a tip sheet to employees,” he said.

Davis claimed that, in Los Angeles, Ralphs and Hughes Markets are “best at Passover because we started in the inner city and grew outwards to the suburbs.” That history gives the companies longer experience with Jewish customers, he explained.

Hughes showed some of its savvy this year with a special Passover promotion. The stores offered a free, five-pound box of Manischewitz or Rishon matzos with a minimum $50 grocery purchase. The Rishon matzos were worth $5.69 a box and the Manischewitz sold for $6.99. Traffic is up this year in the Hughes Market on Glendale Boulevard, said manager Rudy Simpson. “It has been a good draw,” he said.

Supermarkets have been steadily increasing advertising for Passover, Koff said, “but this is the first year, I’m seeing promotional tie-ins in the big markets.”