How can oil produced on the same machinery as tallow even be approved as kosher?
A. Many factories produce Kosher and non-Kosher items in the same machinery. This even applies to Mehadrin standard products such as Chalav Yisrael milk produced in dairies that usually produce ordinary unsupervised milk. Of course, in such cases it is necessary to “kosherise” the equipment before the production of the Kosher product. Mehadrin/certifed products will usually have a religious supervisor present to ensure that the kosherisation and subsequent production are carried out at the proper standards. However, it is possible that sometimes a product produced on shared equipment can be granted “approval”, even without a formal kosherisation process, if the cleaning protocol carried out in the plant is equivalent to a Halachically acceptable kosherisation. Kosher Australia does not give blanket approval to all vegetable oils. Some oil production plants in Australia have been found to have a cleaning protocol of caustic washes combined with boiling oil flushes that can be considered
