Why do supervision agencies supervise products that do not need a hechsher?
A. If by “products that do not need a hechsher” you mean items that have no connection to food, such as bicycles, they don’t certify such products. Otherwise, it is important to remember that there is no hard-and-fast category of products that do not need a hechsher. To say that a product does not need supervision is essentially to make a judgement-call: as far as we know the product is usually made in ways that pose no kosher concerns. Are these “as far as we know” assumptions fail-safe? By no means. Plants make products in unexpected ways all the time. Some products which now need supervision were possibly acceptable without a hechsher in the past. Many dairies, for instance, bottle water, and some of those have switched from filtering the water to pasteurizing it on the same equipment used for the milk. Additonally, by supervising these products, kashrus agencies are able to confirm that the current manufacturing processes used to manufacture them do not do not negatively effect the
