FAQs

No! Our site is a tool to determine if a product is yoshon or chodosh.

• If it is yoshon due to having been made with yoshon flour, the status will be given under the product title.
• If it isn’t automatically yoshon, it will have a date code or lot code to compare your product to.
• Sometimes there may be various runs of a product, and its status can depend on who does the hashgacha. For these items, it will stated as such in the product title.

No, it just means we have no information on that particular product.

The answer is, many products depend on the date code. Any given product in a store can be made on a different day. This means that one person’s product may be made early enough that it is yoshon, and another person’s product could have been made too late, and may be chodosh. Therefore, one has to check each package and determine it by the date code.
For more information on learning about this, please see our articles on Date Codes Explained, and How to Calculate Date Codes.
It is extremely important to put in the small amount of effort to learn this skill, just as one would do for any other mitzvah.

After you search for a product or scan the UPC barcode with our app, click on its name or picture, and the product will open on its own page. The Date Code or Status will be listed next to the picture of the product in Orange.

The date of the last report on the product will be below in green (“Updated As Of [Date of Update]”) so you can tell when the last time it was reported on and if it is current.

Additionally, each entry has  “Hechsher” and “Additional Information” tabs below. The hechsher can be viewed by clicking on the “Hechsher” tab. All pertinent info like Shelf Life, Grain Ingredients, Kosher Status, Hashgacha, Source of information, and UPC number are all listed in “Additional Information”.

Find the Date Code stamped on your product’s package. This may be a “Best By” date, or a production date code. If the date on your package is earlier than that listed for the product on our site, it is considered Yoshon. If it is later, it is Chodosh.

For factory production codes (when applicable), the code is described on our site, as related to the date. A lower number is Yoshon, and the same or higher number is Chodosh. For a complete description on reading Date Codes, see our article “Date Codes Explained“.

Dates are always the last day of that the product is yoshon. If a product’s date is the same as on our site, it is yoshon. If it is the day after, it is chodosh.

Every single product entry will have a source of information. This can be found in the “Additional Information” tab below, under “Update Source”.

The exact date is Yoshon. A date code that is given for a product on our site is the actual Yoshon Cutoff Date. Any date before that date is yoshon, and any date after that is chodosh.

The UPC or Universal Product Code, is what is scanned at grocery stores, and what you use for our app to find product information on our site. It looks like this:

Absolutely! You can scan the product’s UPC barcode with our app, to instantly get the info on that product if we have it. Alternatively, you can also type in the entire UPC Bar Code number, including any numbers on the sides into the search box.

• In the USA, it is usually 12 digits. The exceptions are Trader Joe’s products that have 8, Aldi products that have 13, and beverages, small individual snacks or cereal cups, and candy bars, which can have 6-8.
• In Canada it UPCs are generally 12 digits.
• Everywhere else in the world it is usually 13 digits.

The majority of them do. There are a few items like individually wrapped goods that come in boxes or cases, which do not have. Those must be searched for manually. Otherwise, those that are missing UPCs are most often due to a lack of information.
If you ever have a product and you notice it has no UPC on its product entry on our site, please send us a picture of the whole product and UPC. This will help countless people!

Absolutely! If you see a product on our site that is missing UPC information, and you have the bar code or UPC numbers for it, please send it to us at info@yoshonnetwork.org for inclusion on Yoshon.com. It can also be a text of the 12-digit numbers with the product details (brand, product, and size), or send both a picture of the product and a picture of the UPC. Any help is greatly appreciated!

We are a Media Member of the AKO (Association of Kashrus Agencies). Although Rabbi Avrohom Weinrib (Administrator of Cincinnati Kosher) is one of our TYNI Directors, our policy is not to answer Halachic questions.
That being said, the vast majority of our information is gathered from reliable sources such as updates from kashrut agencies, or directly from mashgichim.

Always! It is updated whenever Yoshon.com is updated. The last updated date will appear on the cover. Check Updates & Downloads for the latest updates and the most current issue.