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Costs

In the United States, the cost of certification for mass-produced items is typically minuscule and is usually more than offset by the advantages of being certified. In 1975 The New York Times estimated the cost per item for obtaining kosher certification at 6.5 millionths of a cent ($0.000000065) per item for a General Foods frozen-food item. According to a 2005 report by Burns & McDonnell, most U.S. national certifying agencies are non-profit, only charging for supervision and on-site work, for which the on-site supervisor "typically makes less per visit than an auto mechanic does per hour". However, re-engineering an existing manufacturing process can be costly. Certification usually leads to increased revenues by opening up additional markets to Jews who keep kosher, Muslims who keep halal, Seventh-day Adventists who keep the main laws of Kosher Diet, vegetarians, and the lactose-intolerant who wish to avoid dairy products (products that are reliably certified as pareve meet this criterion). The Orthodox Union, one of the largest kashrut organizations in the United States, claims that "when positioned next to a competing non-kosher brand, a kosher product will do better by 20%".

In some European Jewish communities, kosher supervision of meat includes a "tax" used to fund Jewish education in the community, which makes kosher meat more expensive than the cost of supervision alone would imply.