About KIA
Why KIA Exists
KIA opened in 2019 with a course for people keeping kosher at home. The AKO Mashgiach Course came next, and the institute now trains home cooks, kitchen staff, mashgichim and certification agencies on five continents.
KIA built the AKO Mashgiach Course to create a single, high-quality, universally recognized training standard for mashgichim, so that a mashgiach trained in London, Mexico City, or Houston all receive the same foundational education, to the same standard, and agencies everywhere can trust that credential.
Rabbi Nosson DubinFounder and Dean, Kosher Institute of America
Before 2019
What It Was Like Before
Every agency trained its own mashgichim. Some were organized about it and some were not, and the depth varied enormously from one agency to the next, and sometimes from one year to the next inside the same agency. Training was expensive to run and usually happened once or twice a year, which meant new mashgichim were often already working before the next session came round.
The result was a profession where the word “mashgiach” could mean almost anything.
What We Do
We teach kosher at every level. People keeping kosher at home, kitchen and foodservice staff, mashgichim, and the agencies that certify them all train with us.
The institute writes the courses, sets the exams and keeps the record of who has been trained, so an agency can confirm a credential before it puts somebody to work.
We build the software agencies run their supervision on, from the establishments they certify to the mashgichim they send out.
And we publish free material for anybody who wants it: a kosher library, a dictionary of kosher terms and a produce inspection course that costs nothing.
What We Do Not Do
We are a training center, not a certifying body.
We do not certify restaurants, caterers, bakeries, factories or products. We are not a supervising agency.
We do not approve or hire mashgichim. Approval belongs to the sponsoring agency, and employment is between a mashgiach and whoever hires him.
We do not rank, evaluate or compare agencies. Every AKO-member agency we work with has met the standard to join AKO. Beyond that we take no position.
We do not answer questions of Jewish law. Those go to the administrator of your agency, or to your own rabbi.
We train for foodservice and general kosher knowledge. We do not train for factory or industrial supervision, and if that is what you need, we will tell you so.
AKO partnership
Built in partnership with AKO, the umbrella body for roughly 120 of the major kosher agencies in the world. The AKO Mashgiach Course is endorsed by AKO and used by dozens of member agencies as the training their new mashgichim start with.
More than 35 agencies on five continents train their mashgichim with us.