LUBICOM CEO Menachem Lubinsky is the founder and co-producer of Kosherfest, the annual trade event for the kosher food & beverage industry and is the editor-in-chief of KosherToday.

Eye on Kosher shares Lubinsky’s personal reflections on kosher-related topics and is released on alternating weeks with My Sixth Sense, which can be found at http://www.koshertoday.com

How Kosher is Coke?

Apr 27, 2009

Walking the aisles of a kosher supermarket on the eve of the just concluded Pesach (Passover) holiday, I couldn’t help but notice just how much has changed since I was growing up. Whereas our menu was limited in those days (everything was somehow made with eggs and potatoes), today there were thousands of products that are made kosher for Passover. The plethora of snacks, sauces, dairy, packaged goods, gourmet and frozen items is only topped off by the Passover Coke with its distinctive yellow cap. While I have always admired the Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola companies for catering to the needs of Jews who observe Passover, this year a story I heard from none other than the noted Washington attorney Nathan Lewin shook my confidence in Coke.

There is apparently an Egyptian Jewish family claiming that the company has been stonewalling on a long-standing claim it has against the company. The Bigio family claims that they were robbed of their substantial wealth by Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1964. To their dismay, they learned in 1994 that Coca-Cola—a company that had leased its Cairo property before Nasser—had “purchased” that same property and was using it for Coca-Cola Bottling of Egypt. The family, according to Lewin, claims that they “were treated disgracefully” by Coke when they sought compensation, and they then brought a lawsuit.

King & Spalding, Coke’s attorneys, have been fighting the case for years on procedural technicalities including telling the Bigios—whom the Egyptian press have tagged as “Zionists”—that they should sue this red-blooded American behemoth in Egypt (where the courts have tossed out ten lawsuits the Bigios brought, allegedly for “lack of prosecution"). The federal courts have twice rejected these frivolous but time-consuming claims—including one trip Coke made to the Supreme Court—but Coke persists in delaying any substantive discussion. Recently Coke represented that it was willing to go to mediation if the Bigios would pay half the cost. The mediation effort failed as Coke made absolutely no offer of any settlement. The Cairo property is conservatively worth $26 million and Coke has made billions of dollars in its Egyptian sales over the past 15 years.

The Bigios kept reducing their demand in order to bring closure to this matter, but Coke breached its assurance of good faith and never offered one dime. The Bigios are hoping that after Coke’s successes in the kosher market that pressure can be brought on the company to finally settle their claim. Refael Bigio has sent an Open Letter to Magen Tzedek (the new name for Hekhsher Tzedek) asking that they take up the cause. Hekhsher Tzedek is the effort launched by some Conservative Jews during the ill-fated events at Agriprocesors in Postville, IA to add an additional “kosher” certification to confirm the company’s practices with regard to humane slaughter, labor rights and the environment.

I somehow choose to believe that despite the stonewalling, Coke will do the right thing and settle their long-standing dispute with the Bigios. After all, as their slogan goes: “Coke is it!”