Kosher Food Symbols — The Full List

The agency marks you meet on a label and the suffix letters that change what they mean, in two tables: who owns each design and where it comes from, then what D, DE, M, F, P and Pareve actually signify.

The agency marks

Each row is a design owned by the organization beside it and licensed for specific products. The design is the trademark; the letters alone are not.

What it looks like	Written as	Agency	Based in	Owned design
Capital U inside a circle	OU	Orthodox Union	United States	Registered certification mark
Capital K inside a circle	OK	OK Kosher Certification	United States	Registered with the USPTO
K inside a six-pointed star	STAR-K	STAR-K Kosher Certification	Baltimore, United States	Agency trademark
K set with the letters KOF	KOF-K	KOF-K Kosher Supervision	New Jersey, United States	Agency trademark
Lower-case c, capital R, lower-case c	cRc	Chicago Rabbinical Council	Chicago, United States	Agency trademark
K inside a triangle	Triangle K	Triangle K	New York, United States	Agency trademark
The letters COR	COR	Kashruth Council of Canada	Toronto, Canada	Agency trademark
The letters MK	MK	MK Kosher, Jewish Community Council of Montreal	Montreal, Canada	Agency trademark
KLBD, often with a lion	KLBD	Kashrut Division, London Beth Din	London, United Kingdom	Agency trademark
Plain K, nothing around it	K	Nobody; a letter cannot be trademarked	Anywhere	No

If a mark is not here, do not guess. The Chicago Rabbinical Council publishes a directory of certifying agencies for exactly this; the regional picture is on kosher symbols on food in the USA.

The suffixes, which is where the confusion lives

Suffix	Read as	What it means
none	no letter after the mark	Usually pareve, but check the agency’s convention first
Pareve, Parve	Pareve	Neither meat nor dairy nor derived from either. Never abbreviated to P
D	Dairy	Contains dairy, or was made on dairy equipment
DE	Dairy Equipment	No dairy ingredients; made on cleaned lines that had run dairy and were not re-kashered
M, Glatt	Meat	Contains meat or was made on meat equipment. Not eaten with dairy
F, Fish	Fish	Contains fish ingredients
P	Passover	Certified for Passover. This does not mean pareve

DE is the one people misread

A DE product has no dairy in it. Someone who has just eaten meat may still eat it, under the practice that follows this distinction, but will not cook it with meat. The trap is the reverse inference: STAR-K notes that agencies differ, and some never use DE at all, marking everything D. A missing DE proves nothing.

P is not Pareve

OK Kosher states this explicitly because it costs people money every spring. P means Kosher for Passover. Pareve is written as a word or shown by the absence of a suffix. Reading OU-P as pareve is reading it backwards.

None of these designs is a character

No agency mark has a Unicode codepoint. What copies as text is the written form in the second column, plain Latin letters that paste into any field. The design is a trademark, and reproducing it without a license is infringement. The mechanism is on what are kosher food symbols, the most common mark on the U symbol on food.