What is the OU’s policy regarding Dairy Equipment?
• ANSWER: Allow us to state the OU’s position on products that may not list a dairy product among their ingredients but that are prepared on dairy equipment. The OU designates such products with an ‘OU-D’ symbol and not ‘DE’ (Dairy Equipment). Over the course of many years of Kosher supervision, our OU Mashgichim, in the course of supervising plants where dairy and non-dairy products are made on the same production line, have too many times witnessed situations where the plant did not perform an adequate cleaning of the equipment between the dairy and non-dairy production runs. (Please understand that what a plant would call ‘cleaning’ and what Halacha calls cleaning are usually not the same.) There is a high probability that residue of a dairy product run finds its way into a Pareve run. Perhaps there is ‘Shishim’, perhaps there isn’t. The OU does not permit Bitul ‘Lechatchilah’. Viewing the problem in this light, the OU believes that our so-called Parave product should no longer clas
