As part of a national beefed-up kosher meat effort for the wholesale company, Nanuet's Costco location has offered a heksher-friendly butcher since late fall -- an experiment company officials say has been successful and is likely to continue.

The Nanuet Costco has offered a kosher bakery since its 1992 opening, but only recently began offering an expanded selection of kosher beef, chicken and prepared foods after the company received positive feedback from a kosher experiment in the village of Lawrence on Long Island.

"Sales tell the story, but we've got a lot of positive feedback from customers since we've started expanding out meat," said Steve Marchioni, the Nanuet store's general manager.
Nationally, Costco will occasionally alter its inventory to reflect the dietary preferences of local communities, said Jeff Lyons, the company's senior vice president of fresh foods.
A handful of locations around the country -- most centered around New York, Florida or Los Angeles - offer the expanded kosher selections, and another group of store - these centered around metropolitan areas throughout the U.S. -- offer a wider variety of organic foods than the average Costco.

Rockland possesses the kind of Jewish identity that would appeal to Costco's desire to match its inventory to the community its stores serve. The county is home to a number of heavily Orthodox Jewish towns, most notably Monsey and New Square. Rockland also houses about a dozen Conservative and Reform synagogues, and is host to a well-regarded K-8 Hebrew day school and a strong JCC. According to a 2000 study by the Glenmary Research Center, Rockland was the most statistically Jewish county in the nation, its 90,000 Jews making up 31.4 percent of the county's population.

 "It's really hard to please everyone in every community we live in but we do look at large metro areas and see if there are things that we can do to bring value to the consumers that are shopping with us," said Lyons, who is based out of Costco's corporate headquarters in Issaquah, Wash.

In the communities where Costco has rolled out the yiddishkeit-friendly meat sections, Lyons said the company has seen its kosher beef and chicken end up as some of those stores' "best-selling items."

And for him, that's more than reason enough to continue the pilot program, which has been running for about a year.

"We try not to be everything to everybody but we try to be the best value for the things we carry," Lyons said. "If we can maintain the volume of sales, then it means we're meeting a need for our consumer."

The kosher pilot locations are selected by Costco's regional directors, Lyons said - Nanuet answers to a regional office in Sterling, Va. -- as those employees "have their hands on the pulse" of the communities they supervise.

Marchioni said Nanuet was contacted after the company's success in Lawrence. Now, his store is working on further expanding its selection of kosher products - perhaps stretching into cold cuts and beyond.

"It's been successful and I don't see it going away," Marchioni said. "If it works, great - we stay with it."

Lyons said the kosher meat industry's organizational structure contributes to some of the difficulty.

"The kosher meat industry is a little fractured, rather small processing plants," he said. "We're not just going to carry any kosher. We're going to carry graded Kosher. We just have to find those processing plants that can do what we ask them to."

That's a concern not just at the national level, but at local stores like Nanuet, too -- Marchioni said it's difficult to find a company who can provide the store with enough meat.
"The supply's been very challenging, especially with the beef," he said. "Chicken, we seem to be OK with for the most part."

The supply-demand conundrum has slowed Costco's rollout of kosher-friendly stores - as Lyons said, it's a case of seven stores requesting kosher meat when there's only enough for two - but the company is working to vet suppliers to ensure that kosher meat remains a sustainable program.

Moshe Mendlowitz, the store manager of Monsey Glatt Kosher on Rt. 59, said Costco's expansion hasn't affected his business. Though he said he wasn't certain on the numbers, Mendlowitz thinks Costco's meat is more expensive than his store's.

"I haven't noticed anything," he said. "Generally, the people who buy in Costco are looking for deals, and if it's not a deal, they're not going to buy it."

The biggest problem for Costco seems to be having a supply large enough to satisfy the demand of customers for kosher meat.

At the Nanuet Costco one Thursday night in early June, dozens of Orthodox Jews shopped in the butcher and bakery section, examining cheeses and picking through meat.
One man who wished not to be identified said the kosher meat expansion is a step in the right direction - but it's not a perfect development.

"I think it's a good start," he said. "I don't think the prices are too great. They could improve the prices."