Kosher Food Symbols — What Each Mark on the Package Means
These marks are registered certification logos printed on packaging, not characters you can type. This page identifies the common ones, explains the letters that follow them, and says what a bare K on a label actually tells you.
Every page in this section
- What Are Kosher Food Symbols?Mirror pair — 'what are kosher food symbols' and 'what are the kosher symbols on food' are
- Kosher Food Symbols — The Full ListThe lookup table, no repeater
- Jewish Kosher Food SymbolsNo repeater
- The U Symbol on Food — OU Kosher Explained720/mo at KD 0 and the single most literal 'what is this mark' query in the harvest: someo
- Kosher Symbols on Food in the USANo repeater
- Kosher Symbols on Food PackagingKD 8 — the softest keyword in the kosher cluster and the one a DR 10 site should reach fir
These are logos, not characters
Nothing on this page can be copied and pasted. Kosher marks are registered certification marks – artwork owned by the agency that grants them. No font contains them, and no Unicode codepoint or keyboard shortcut produces one. If you need a mark for a document or a label, you request the artwork from the agency under license; lifting it off a competitor’s package is trademark infringement, which is exactly why the marks are registered. For marks that genuinely are text characters, see food symbols to copy and paste.
Identifying the mark in front of you
| What you see on the package | Who it is |
|---|---|
| A letter U inside a circle | OU – Orthodox Union |
| A letter K inside a circle | OK Kosher Certification |
| A letter K inside a six-pointed star | STAR-K |
| A letter D with a star at its center | STAR-D, the dairy mark administered by STAR-K |
| A Hebrew letter kof set inside a Latin K | KOF-K |
| A letter K inside an equilateral triangle | Triangle K, also called K Meshulash |
| The letters cRc | Chicago Rabbinical Council |
| A plain letter K with nothing around it | No agency at all – see the last section |
The letters printed beside the mark
The mark says who certified it. A letter beside it says what kind of food it is.
- D – dairy.
- DE – made on dairy equipment but without dairy ingredients. Not the same as D, and it matters if you keep the separation.
- M, or Glatt on meat products – meat.
- Pareve or Parve – neither meat nor dairy.
- P – Passover. This is the one that catches people out. P does not mean pareve. A product can carry P and still be dairy.
The agencies
OU – Orthodox Union
The circled U, and the one most people picture. The OU states that its symbol is an internationally registered certification mark – registered in the United States, in many other countries and with US Customs – and that unauthorized use is trademark infringement. The OU also says it deals with roughly fifty illegal uses a year against something on the order of 225,000 products carrying the mark legitimately, which is useful mainly as a sense of scale. There is a page on this mark alone at the U symbol on food.
OK Kosher Certification
A letter K inside a circle. OK cites United States Patent and Trademark Office registrations 2,094,030 and 795,748 for its mark, and states that the registration covers the design even when it is set in a different typeface. Redrawing the letter does not make it a different mark.
STAR-K and STAR-D
STAR-K is a K inside a six-pointed star. STAR-D is a separate mark for dairy products – a letter D with a star at its center – and it is administered exclusively by STAR-K, so the two belong to the same organization.
KOF-K
The Hebrew letter kof set inside a Latin K, which is where the name comes from.
cRc – Chicago Rabbinical Council
Written with a lowercase c, a capital R and a lowercase c. The cRc is the largest regional Orthodox rabbinical organization in America, and it publishes the consumer directory people use to look up marks they do not recognize.
Triangle K
A letter K inside an equilateral triangle, also called K Meshulash – meshulash is Hebrew for triangle. It is run by the Ralbag family and certifies brands including Hebrew National.
The bare K, and why it is different from all of the above
A plain K with nothing around it is not an agency mark. A single letter of the alphabet cannot be trademarked, so no organization owns one. A bare K is the manufacturer’s own declaration about its own product. There is no agency behind it, no field representative who inspected the plant, no letter of certification you can ask to see, and nobody with standing to act if the letter is used dishonestly.
That does not make it worthless. Some products with a bare K really are made under private rabbinical supervision that uses no mark of its own. The package cannot tell you which case you are in. The only way to find out is to call the manufacturer, ask who supervises the product, and check that answer with the agency named.
A note on sourcing
The OU, OK, STAR-K and Triangle K entries follow those organizations’ own published statements. The KOF-K and cRc entries are described from secondary sources, because both organizations’ own sites blocked our checks – treat those two as less firmly sourced, and confirm with the agency if it matters.
From here: what kosher food symbols are, the full list for the smaller agencies, kosher symbols on food packaging for where the marks sit on a box, and halal food symbols for the same question on the other side of the aisle.