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.

After you search for a product and click on its name or picture, the product will open on its own page. The Date Code or Status will be listed directly under the name of the product.

The date of the last report on the product will be below this 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 one has “Description” and “Additional Info” to the right. The hechsher can be viewed by clicking on “Description”, and all the pertinent info like Grain Ingredients, Shelf Life, Kosher Status, etc. is in “Additional Info”.

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“.

This is an excellent question! It depends on how you hold. You may want to ask your Rav which way to hold.

• According to Project Chodosh (which publishes the Guide), all dates must be before the listed cutoff date.
• According to Star-K of Baltimore, dates can be on the same listed date and will still be considered yoshon.

For any products made outside of the USA: Reported dates are the last day of being yoshon, unless otherwise specified.

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

A date code that is given for the product made in the USA usually is the actual Chodosh Cutoff Date, meaning any date before that date is yoshon, and any date after that is chodosh.
In Canada and other countries, it is often the Yoshon Cutoff Date, meaning that date and earlier are Yoshon, and will generally be stated “[date] or earlier is yoshon“.

Definitely! Be sure to type in the entire UPC Bar Code number, including any numbers on the sides.

• In the USA, it is usually 12 digits. The exceptions are Trader Joe’s products, and small individual snacks or cereal cups.
• In Canada it is also usually 12 digits.
• Everywhere else in the world it is usually 13 digits.

The majority of them do, and we are progressing toward having a UPC bar code number for every single product. Those that are missing UPCs are simply 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!

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, directly from company mashgichim, and most often from Project Chodosh that publishes the Guide to Chodosh.

Always! As soon as the Guide to Chodosh or any bulletin updates are released, we post them for download on our site. Check Updates & Downloads for the latest updates and the most current Guide. If the copy is not recent, then Project Chodosh has not yet released a newer version.

Sorry, but we cannot mail you a copy of the Guide. We are The Yoshon Network Inc. (TYNI), which does the website Yoshon.com. We do not publish “Guide to Chodosh”.
Please contact Project Chodosh at yherman20@gmail.com. We are not affiliated with them, we only report the information from the Guide.
We have a page where you can learn where and how to get the Guide. Go to our page “Guide to the Guide“.

We do offer a download of the Guide on our Updates & Downloads page.