Just outside of Monroe, NY, resides a mostly Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jewish community in the village of Kiryas Joel. More than 25 years ago the residents of the community began slaughtering about 200 chickens a day behind a shopping center due to a lack of fresh, kosher chicken. The Grand Rabbi of the community asked a local businessman, Mayer Hirsch, to open a kosher poultry plant to serve the community’s growing demand for fresh, kosher chicken. Hirsch dutifully obliged the Grand Rabbi’s request and opened KJ Poultry. At the time, the new plant covered 5,000 square feet and slaughtered about 3,000 chickens a day while following the strictest kosher standards.

“There are many different standards for kosher,” said Meni Bruk, plant manager at KJ Poultry. “It’s not just kosher or not kosher; the standard is how strict you go by kosher. The community here is very strict on kosher and wanted a kosher standard that matched their standards.”

“The Grand Rabbi is here every single week, and he’s walking through the whole place keeping on top of it, and making sure we keep the highest standard,” said Chaim Oberlander, chief executive officer at KJ Poultry, and Mayer Hirsch’s son-in-law. “…You’re not going to find such a high standard in the United States, in the whole world, you’re not going to find such a high standard in a kosher poultry plant.”

In demand

The plant grew incrementally over time and now spans 75,000 square feet. Also, KJ Poultry began using another slaughter-only plant in Pennsylvania one year ago that covers 50,000 square feet. Currently, the KJ facility is adding a second cook line, with other projects, including a live handling area that is planned for the future.

KJ uses the Pennsylvania facility to cover the ongoing increase in demand while the expansions and renovations continue at the Kiryas Joel facility. Kosher chicken, both raw and cooked, is in such high demand KJ Poultry cannot keep up with it, and that demand has maintained throughout the history of the plant.

“Slowly the community has grown and the demand outside for this product also has grown,” Bruk said. “Every two years or so we expand and by now we slaughter 50,000 a day and it’s still not enough. So, we do another 30,000 in Pennsylvania. So, we went from 3,000 at the beginning to 80,000 a day. And still the demand is there. We’re sold out every night.”

But all the growth does not come only from the local community. The product’s high kosher standard makes it popular throughout the United States, as well as internationally. KJ ships domestically using company-owned trucks to deliver to customers in California, Florida, Chicago and Atlanta, just to name a few, and by sea to cities abroad. Bruk said the company has become the largest kosher poultry plant in America.

“Every place there is a Jewish community we ship there,” Bruk said.

The market demand for KJ Poultry products is so great, the company told Costco it had to wait on a deal until the company could produce enough additional product for the club store because KJ Poultry wasn’t willing to sacrifice products for existing customers only to sell to the club store giant.

“They came after us for a few years, but we pushed them,” Bruk said. “We were not ready. We couldn’t. What’s the point of committing to them and then not fulfilling? It’s the worst thing to do. I will not take a new customer if I know that I cannot serve them and irritate my existing customers because I took a new one on.”

With the Pennsylvania slaughter plant and additions at the New York location, KJ has been selling chicken franks and pretzel-coated tenders to Costco now for about four months.

Bruk and Oberlander credit the company’s meticulous detail to the highest kosher standards for the demand.

Processing strict kosher

KJ’s kosher processing starts on the company-owned farms in Pennsylvania. The farms hold between 30,000 and 50,000 chickens on average, and depending on the size of the farm, some might have as many as 80,000. Schedules and vaccinations are strictly monitored for health and the chickens can never be fed any by-products. When ready for slaughter, company owned trucks bring the live chickens to the plant.

The kosher process begins with rabbis hand slaughtering every chicken. The rabbis who slaughter must pay close attention during this process. Each rabbi has his own knife and sharpening stone and has learned his craft from a book, as well as from one specific rabbi that teaches the technique. Nine rabbis work on the slaughter line for an hour and a half then rest while nine other rabbis work for an hour and half. This nine-on, nine-off system goes throughout the day.

“They have to stay so focused on their job, they cannot work the full day straight,” Bruk said. “So, we have two crews doing the same job, one on and one off.”

During the off time, KJ Poultry has specific quarters for rabbis only that include a breakroom for eating, individual rooms for rest and a synagogue inside the plant.

While working the slaughter line, rabbis check their knives every five minutes for any nicks in the blade. If a knife has even the smallest nick in the blade it cannot be used to slaughter, and any bird killed with a nicked blade will not meet the kosher standard. A light above each kill site illuminates to let the rabbi know five minutes has passed. Should a knife have a nick in the blade upon inspection, every chicken killed with the blade the five minutes prior will not meet the company’s kosher standard and will go to products designated as halal. KJ Poultry is also certified halal under Circle H.

Next is a series of checks beyond what the USDA does. Kosher rules dictate a chicken must have been able to live for at least another year if it had not been slaughtered to be kosher.

“Even if it’s alive and well, but if you have any signs in it that tells you that within a year it would have died, it’s not a kosher chicken,” Bruk said. “So, we check beside what the USDA checks; we are checking to see if we can tell any signs of that happening.”

Once chickens pass the rabbinical and USDA health inspection, KJ Poultry rinses them in water only, to keep kosher, and because kosher rules dictate no eating of blood, they pass through a salting process. And again, KJ Poultry prides itself on keeping the highest standards of kosher within the entire process from slaughter, through salting, cut up and further processing.

“Most companies use any salt,” Bruk said. “We use only rock salt.”

KJ Poultry went to Italy and began importing rock salt used for pretzels. Now the company sources its salt from Arrow Salt.

“We went to the mine and found a special salt,” Oberlander said. “A rock, pretzel salt, it doesn’t melt.”

Rabbis salt the chickens as they come down the line and place them on a slow-moving conveyor. The chickens remain salted for one hour before moving to a tumbler to remove the salt. The salt from the tumbler is captured and used for beef hide tanning elsewhere and kept out of wastewater. The chicken processing operation requires 20 tons of salt a day with 16 tons being reclaimed for the beef hide industry.

“People often say kosher chicken tastes better, but they don’t know why,” Bruk said. “It’s because it’s been seasoned. It’s brined and softer.”

After salting and tumbling, the chickens are rinsed and chilled to below 40°F and sent to cut up. One cut up line and one deboning line process the ready-to-cook and raw chicken. The company uses an automatic breast debone machine with the other cuts being done by hand. About 80% of the product is shipped to retail outlets and the rest to foodservice. Ninety percent of production is sold as raw while the other 10% is cooked.

The cook line resides on the third floor of the New York plant with an elevator that brings up raw products and sends cooked products down. A mixing and stuffing room handles kosher chicken franks and deli meats cooked by two, three-rack Vemag ovens and one nine-rack Alkar oven, according to Bruk. The franks and deli meats move out the back of the ovens to a cooler that brings the products to 30°F before further processing, metal detection, packaging, palletizing and shipping.

A small Marlen line works on the company’s battered, breaded and fried chicken tenders. Once fully cooked, the tenders move to a Unitherm spiral freezer and are then packaged. A new Marlen fry line, scheduled to start operation by July 16, 2024, at the plant will handle roughly four times the volume in addition to the existing Marlen line.

Solid workforce

The KJ Poultry plant in New York employs 250 people from the area and 80 rabbis. Many processing facilities today consider labor to be one of the most, if not the most difficult challenges they face in running operations smoothly. But the kosher plant does not struggle with labor.

KJ poultry recruits and retains labor with a simple technique. The company gives its employees overtime and pays overtime at time-and-a-half. Working on a typical chicken line does not pay the highest wages in general. Bruk said being too strict on regular hours causes employees to not earn enough take-home pay to survive.

“If you give them one day of overtime, and I’m not talking crazy, even 10 hours overtime a week, it’s time-and-a- half,” he said. “It makes a huge difference in their paycheck, and they stay.”

Bruk and the company believe that paying overtime, while not ideal to any company’s bottom line, is a small price to pay to maintain the labor they need and more.

“You have to give them the minimum to survive, and the minimum is at least 10 hours overtime a week, at least, and the employees are more than happy,” Bruk said. “They stay here, and you cannot get them out.”

Bruk compared employee wages to a company reviewing its bottom line. While a company does business to make money, so does an employee work to make money.

“They’re not here because they like to hang chicken, they don’t wake up in the morning and dream about it,” he said. “They’re here because they need food on the table, don’t forget this. If you’re going to hurt their bottom line, they’re not going to be here. That’s it, very simple. If you don’t meet the bottom line the employee is looking for, they’re not staying.”

The 80 rabbis on staff oversee all the operations throughout the plant, not just perform the kosher slaughter. The strict kosher standards require this. Rabbis must turn the ovens on in the morning and turn them off when the shift is over. The company’s rabbis also ensure outside ingredients used on the cook side meet the highest kosher standards before being added to product.

“We’re going to send down a rabbi to stay at the ingredient manufacturer, to observe, to make sure that it’s a high standard,” Oberlander said.

Continual expansion

While KJ Poultry has expanded over the years, it continues to do so today and into the future. With various projects presently, there are many planned for the future. The growth of the company itself, and the demand for its product, see no end in sight for the potential of the company.

The current addition at the back of the plant is for the new Marlen fry line and contains its own bagging, packing and labeling systems. It occupies the third floor of the facility, because of a mountain behind the plant, it had to be built up. A bay door was installed so a crane could bring the large equipment in. KJ Poultry left the door just in case it might be utilized in the future.

A fourth floor, under construction currently, will house an employee area including a breakroom and restrooms one floor above the new fry line, as well as an electrical room, boilers and refrigeration. Once the additions are complete, all further-processing employees will work exclusively in the newly added space.

At the front of the plant, a complicated and intricate expansion of the slaughter area has recently been finished. Because the mountain is immediately behind KJ Poultry’s current building, excavation crews dug out the base of the mountain to make room for more processing space. Apartments on top of the mountain required the main sewer line to be rerouted. The rerouting was approved by local government, and that portion of the project is complete.

On the backside of the property, the company owns a flat piece of land. KJ will develop that land to serve as a new chicken receiving and live holding area. The new lairage space will provide room for the company’s ever increasing demand.

“Over the years the demand grew because we did what we did so good and we built a lot of trust and slowly we grew,” Oberlander said. “We started with about 3,000 chickens a day. Right now, we are roughly 300,000 a week. A big jump in 20 years. So, 20 years from now, we hope to be 300 million a week. That’s our vision.”