From The New York Times
by Samuel Freedman
During the early months of 2010, Adnan A. Durrani found himself frequently thinking of kosher hot dogs. To be more precise, he was thinking of an ad campaign for them created decades earlier by the Hebrew National company. Its well-known slogan went, “We answer to a higher authority.”
Let it be said that Mr. Durrani was, in many ways, an unlikely recipient for such a revelation. An observant Muslim born to Pakistani parents, a Wall Street refugee turned natural-foods entrepreneur, he was then trying to create a line of frozen-food entrees adhering to the Muslim religious standard of halal for the American market.
And Mr. Durrani was doing so in an especially forbidding political climate, with a demagogic battle raging against a proposed Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan depicted as the “ground zero mosque,” and judicial and criminal attacks against a mosque being constructed in Murfreesboro, Tenn. “Perfect timing,” he recalled dryly.
Yet the Hebrew National mantra attested to the goal that Mr. Durrani had set for his nascent company, Saffron Road: to hit both the bull’s-eye of a specific religious audience and appeal to the concentric ring of other consumers inclined to impute positive traits to any food with a sanctified aura.
By the late summer of 2010, the first Saffron Road entrees landed store shelves. This year, as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan approaches, bringing with it daytime fasts and nightly iftar meals, the company has put out more than 50 different products and built annual sales on a pace to reach $35 million.
As significant, thanks to a close partnership with the Whole Foods chain, Saffron Road’s products have moved beyond a core audience of observant American Muslims and into the commercial mainstream. In that respect, Saffron Road is among the first halal producers to follow what might be called the kosher model of simultaneously serving and transcending a communal constituency.
“What it takes for an ethno-religious food to cross over into the mainstream is, first of all, buy-in from the general public — a perception that this food has something of value that other food does not,” said Sue Fishkoff, author of the book “Kosher Nation.” That something, she continued, might be a sense, even if inaccurate, that the food is healthier, purer or of higher quality because it has been produced under religious supervision.
