The e-mail came with a photo of an elderly man in a butcher’s coat next to the faded, black-and-white image of a tot. “At age 87, my father is re-launching his meat business — which for fifty years was a staple of the Jewish community in Canada,” Miriam Perl wrote to the Forward. “Suggested headline: Holocaust Survivor reinvents himself at age 87.”
Until a fire destroyed Herschel Perl’s kosher-foods business in 2006, it was indeed a mainstay of Jewish Toronto, supplying more than half the city’s market for ready-made kosher. The business, which started as a tiny shop in Toronto’s west end in 1953, eventually grew into a 60-employee enterprise. Its retail operation grew into Canada’s largest kosher meat store. Perl’s even opened a Glatt kosher fast-food spot called Bais Burger.
“Perl’s butcher shop and hamburger joint were icons in the frum neighborhood here,” Chad Derrick, a Toronto television producer and kosher consumer, told the Forward. “Perl’s was everywhere.”
Now, after a six-year absence, Herschel Perl is about to sink his teeth into the meat business again. This time, he’s launching a wholesale business to crank out beloved Perl’s products like salami, hotdogs, pepperoni, pepperettes, turkey and chicken deli slices. The kosher pioneer has already secured distribution in local kosher retail outlets; he expects the products to hit shelves in national chains like Loblaws, Sobey’s, Metro, Fortino’s and Costco within weeks.
With help from his daughter, the Forward caught up with Herschel Perl by e-mail in Toronto.
There’s no need to brown bag it if you are a kosher football fanatic headed to New Orleans for Super Bowl XLVII next February.
Kosher fare will be served in the stadium at the big game, reports Kosher Today. Game-goers will get to chow down on beef hot dogs, beef sausages with peppers and onions, polish beef sausage, pretzels, bottled soda, bottled water and bottled beer. (In other words, it’ll be your basic football stadium food, minus the nachos — sorry, vegetarians.)
All the food will be provided by Kosher Sports, Inc.,, which runs a kosher stand at all New Orleans Saints games at the Superdome. If you’ve chowed down on kosher franks at Citifield, the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, Barclays Center, United Center, Oriole Park, American Airlines Arena, and Ford Field, then you can expect more of the same.
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