The import department in the Chief Rabbinate has for years been considered a significant barrier that has caused, among other things, the cost of living.
For months, importers seeking kosher clearance had to wait in line due to significant manpower shortages and communication difficulties with kosher bodies around the world, which led to goods accumulating dust in warehouses - and costs fell on customers' shoulders.
The Chief Rabbinate recently completed a real revolution - a significant upgrade of the system that provides kosher status for imported products by digital means, as part of which the processing times for applications for kosher certificates were reduced to only one day.
In the field of importing kosher products, an importer who wishes to import a product while marking it as kosher is required to receive supervision services from a kosher body recognized by the rabbinate and then he is required to obtain a kosher certificate from the import department at the rabbinate.
According to the situation that existed until today, only food importers were allowed to keep in touch, through the computerized system, with the import department at the Chief Rabbinate - which sometimes requires the department to contact training bodies to hold various inquiries about the product, often causing significant delays in receipt. The certificate.
In recent months, Harel Goldberg, the firm's CEO, has led a move in which he has massively reduced the number of kosher certificate applications, which stood at thousands of products, through the inclusion of staff in the department, and now the rabbinate Now, as part of the system upgrade through the new digital interface, training bodies will be involved in the application review process, by digital means, so that the application processing process will be drastically shortened.
The new interface, developed by the Chief Rabbinate, won an award last week in the Outstanding Computing Project category in a competition organized by the People and Computers organization.
Goldberg said that "the development of the new interface is in line with our vision to reduce, as much as possible, regulatory barriers and allow food importers a service experience with professional standards and schedules as soon as possible, all while adhering to kosher procedures, for the benefit of food importers and kosher food consumers."
The significance of the move, it should be noted, can also be passed on to consumers.
Thus, it was recently announced that the "Carrefour" supermarket chain, which is entering Israel in the near future, seeks to approve, in terms of kosher status, thousands of products that it imports into Israel.
If several months ago they might have waited two months or more for the approval of various products, now the approval will stand for one day.
Importers who have had to store goods in warehouses will be able to get it straight from the port to stores in a very short time.
These days, the Chief Rabbinate is conducting a pilot with importers and kosher bodies that have joined in, and the rabbinate aspires that most food importers and kosher bodies will operate in this route, at the end of the pilot.
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