Big skills for kosher pricing panel

Mandy Yachad and Herschel Mayers, who both have extensive legal and commercial experience, have been appointed to the new independent pricing review panel for kosher manufactured products, the board of the Union of Orthodox (UOS) announced late on Wednesday this week.

This follows the UOS board’s announcement of measures to address pressing kashrut issues raised in recent weeks. These measures include effective kashrut query monitoring, new hechsher pricing categories, and the establishment of the panel.

Yachad and Mayers will review any complaints from food manufacturing companies with regards to either pricing or processing of Beth Din kosher certification. The UOS board has stressed that the panel will deal only with these issues and won’t be involved in any other UOS or kashrut-related issues. Additionally, the review option is open only to those companies which have fully exhausted a bona fide engagement with the kosher department and still remain unsatisfied.

The board says Mayers and Yachad will have the power to appoint other panellists on an ad-hoc basis as they see fit to deal with issues which may arise in future.

Mayers, an actuary, is the co-founder of Discovery Life, and was previously the head of Vitality in the United Kingdom (UK). He was also previously part of Liberty Life as head of individual and group business, underwriting, systems, technology, product development, and finance, before leaving in 2000 to found Discovery Life.

Mayers was appointed chief executive of Discovery Life and Discovery Invest in 2006, and in 2007, became chief executive of PruProtect in the UK, a joint venture between Discovery and Prudential Assurance Company.

He remained chief executive when Discovery took full ownership of the business, and rebranded it VitalityLife in 2014. In June 2018, he assumed the additional role of chief executive of VitalityInvest.

Yachad, a BCom LLB graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, is a trustee and director of a number of charitable institutions including the Rambam Trust and the Gesher Small Business Relief Fund. He previously practised at Werksmans Attorneys for almost 15 years (the last nine of which were as a partner in the commercial department) before joining Peregrine Group.

Yachad was appointed an executive director to the group board in November 2010, in which capacity he served until March 2019.

The panel can be contacted at sakosherreview@gmail.com