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Some pareve products with OU certification simply have 'OU' printed on the label. Others have 'OU Pareve' printed. Is this difference significant? Does it represent some kashrut issue? Or is this based on the company's preference?

(Note that I'm not referring to 'OU-P' labels, which are for Passover, not pareve.)

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    Perhaps there are some products that can be dairy or pareve so that the company (or the OU) would want to be certain that a mistake has is not made by the consumer.
    – sabbahillel
    Aug 22, 2016 at 10:27
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    Call the OU at (212)613-8241 and they'll be happy to tell you. They have an extension for consumer questions such as these.
    – Mark A.
    Aug 22, 2016 at 19:00

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I don't see OU-Parve often, but when I do it is usually (possibly always; I don't remember a time when this was not the case) on an item which by default would likely be assumed to have some status other than parve.

The example that comes to mind is soy ice cream. Many people would assume ice cream is dairy and even if they saw an OU without the "D" for dairy, it may not even occur to them that the product is not dairy (not because they think the OU would neglect to label something dairy, but simply because the thought of ice cream being parve didn't occur to them and they weren't paying that much attention to the [lack of] specific designation on the ice cream container). In this case, the parve designation does two things:

  1. It brings the parve status to the attention of people who might otherwise not have thought of it.
  2. Similarly, it affirms the parve status to people who may have had doubts.
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  • I haven't bought margarine in a while. But, I believe that it still has the parve designation. Nowadays, this is esp. important on margarine than it was decades ago. Many margarines these days are partially "butter", and are dairy.
    – DanF
    Aug 22, 2016 at 20:39
  • Though it makes sense, I don't think your answer is correct. The product that sparked this question is Trader Joe's brand seltzer, which has an OU Pareve label. I think most would assume by default that seltzer would be pareve.
    – Noam
    Aug 23, 2016 at 16:32

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