Releone Almanac · Issue One · Letter 06

Beit Yosef

The Discipline Behind a Letter on a Label

Lead Long-Form Editorial · Releone Almanac · Issue One · Essay 06

When you turn over a Releone jar at the public launch in December 2026 you will find, on the bottom rim of the label, the letters OU inside a circle. The OU is the certifying mark of the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certifying agency in North America. The OU sets a strict standard. Most Americans encountering a kosher symbol assume that this is the standard — that there is kosher and there is not kosher and the OU mark covers the kosher case.

This is wrong. There are layers above the OU.

The layer Releone is moving toward is called Beit Yosef. It refers to the rulings of Rabbi Yosef Karo, who wrote the Shulchan Aruch in 1565, four hundred and sixty years ago, in the Galilean city of Safed. The Shulchan Aruch is the foundational code of Sephardic Jewish law. The Beit Yosef tier represents adherence to the more stringent of Karo's rulings — particularly around fish-curing protocols, blood-removal practices, and the specific certification of canning + pressing equipment. Most Sephardic communities — Italian, Moroccan, Iranian-tradition, Israeli, Mediterranean — observe at the Beit Yosef tier. Most American supermarket kosher food does not.

I am writing about this because the difference between the two tiers — OU at launch, Beit Yosef pursued for Y2 — is the difference between a brand that operates the kosher discipline as a marketing certification and a brand that operates it as a four-hundred-year-old code with internal hierarchies that mark the difference between perfunctory observance and serious observance.

Releone is the second kind of brand. This essay explains why.

What I learned from my father

My father, Joseph Sellam, was born in Paris in 1948 to an Italian-Jewish family that had moved to France from Livorno through a chain of Mediterranean displacements that had been going on for generations. He died in 2019. He was, throughout his life, a Sephardic Jew at the Beit Yosef tier of observance — meaning that what was on his table on a Friday night and what was permitted in his kitchen during the year was not the same as what is permitted in a typical American kosher household.

I learned the difference before I had the words for it. I was six years old when my father sat me down at the cutting board in our small Paris kitchen and showed me three knives. The first was for fish. The second was for cheese. The third was reserved for the Sabbath. I asked him why three knives, knowing that in school I had only ever seen one knife in a cooking demonstration. He said, Because we are different. I said, Different from who? He said, Different from people who have only one knife.

That is, in two sentences, the entire premise of the Beit Yosef tier. The kosher standards exist on a spectrum. At the lower end, you have the standard kosher of mainstream Ashkenazi tradition that most American supermarkets carry. At the upper end, you have the Beit Yosef tier, which adds — among many other practices — bedikat tola'im (intensive insect-checking on leafy greens), specific fish-bloodletting protocols at the moment of catch, kashering of equipment to a stricter standard before any food preparation, and the specific Sephardic interpretation of what counts as a vessel that has touched a non-kosher substance.

I grew up watching my father observe at the Beit Yosef tier. He did not boast about it. He did not publish it. He did not put a special label on his food. He just lived inside the discipline.

What the discipline produces

Here is what the Beit Yosef discipline produces in food production, specifically:

Take a fish — say, the wild Bluefin tuna that goes into Releone's flagship Bluefin × Tartufo SKU.

In a standard OU-certified production, the fish is caught, killed, gutted, iced, transported to the processing facility, filleted, cured in salt + olive oil, jarred, sealed, and shipped. The OU mashgiach (rabbinical inspector) certifies that the equipment used has been kashered to the OU standard, that no non-kosher ingredient has touched the production line, that the fish has been confirmed to have fins and scales (a kosher fish marker) at the moment of inspection.

At the Beit Yosef tier, three additional protocols apply:

The bleeding-at-catch protocol. The fish must be bled within thirty minutes of landing, not just iced. The blood removal at this stage produces a different protein structure in the cured product. A Beit Yosef-tier customer can taste this; the fish is cleaner, the cure is sharper, the texture is more delicate.
The kashering-before-each-batch protocol. OU certification kashers the equipment once. Beit Yosef requires kashering between each batch run, especially when production has been paused. This is operationally expensive and is the main reason most American kosher producers do not pursue Beit Yosef.
The Sephardic-tradition equipment inspection. Certain stainless steel grades and certain pressing methods are permitted at the OU level but not at the Beit Yosef level. Releone's selected co-pack facility for Y1 will be evaluated on whether it can be upgraded to the Beit Yosef-tier equipment standard for Y2.

These three protocols collectively produce a fish jar that is, at the eating moment, materially different. Releone's customer at the apex tier — the customer who will be the Patron-tier member, who will spend $25,000+ annually with the brand and who knows the difference between Sephardic Beit Yosef-level fish-curing and standard kosher — will recognize the difference.

What I was told at Yeshiva NY

I studied at Yeshiva NY between 2018 and 2020. I was twenty years old when one of my rabbis there — a Sephardic rabbi from Aleppo via Brooklyn, a man whose family had been kashering meats for nine generations — sat me down and walked me through the difference between OU-tier and Beit Yosef-tier observance in two hours of talking. I had grown up inside it. I had not until that conversation had the framework to articulate it.

He said two things that have stayed with me.

The first: The OU certification is honest. It is rigorous. It serves the great majority of observant Jews well. Do not denigrate it.

The second: But the Beit Yosef level exists because there are people for whom the OU level is not enough — not because they are arrogant about their observance, but because their family's tradition has held to a higher standard for four hundred years and they want to honor that. The brand that serves these people seriously is the brand that takes the second step, even though the first step is sufficient for most.

Releone is launching in December 2026 at the OU tier. We will pursue the Beit Yosef tier as a Y2 upgrade across the line. The audit, the equipment investment, and the rabbinical relationship-building takes twelve to eighteen months from launch. The Y2 jar — the same Bluefin × Tartufo, the same Cantabrian anchovy, the same Sicilian sardine — will carry both the OU mark and the Beit Yosef hechsher. The price will not change. The cost to produce will be roughly twenty percent higher. We will absorb that cost.

We will absorb it because the customer who buys Releone food at the apex tier is, in a non-trivial number of cases, the same customer who can taste the difference. And we are building Releone to serve that customer.

Why I am writing about this in Issue One

The Releone brand thesis is that the apex of any luxury category is occupied by families and houses that hold to a discipline that is not visible from the outside. Hermès does this with leather. Loro Piana does this with cashmere. Cesare Attolini does this with the Neapolitan shoulder. Cifonelli does this with the Place Vendôme cut. Marco De Luca's family in the Amalfi olive grove does this with the four-hour press window. The hunter in Alba does this with the eleven-volume notebook.

The Beit Yosef discipline is the same kind of thing, applied to kosher food production. It is not visible on the label except for those who know what to look for. It costs more to operate. It is harder to maintain. It is the right thing to do for the customer who is paying for the apex.

When you turn over a Releone jar at the December 2026 launch, you will see the OU symbol. When you turn over a Releone jar in late 2027 or 2028, you will see the OU symbol AND the Beit Yosef hechsher next to it. That moment will not be announced. There will not be a press release. The jar will simply, quietly, carry both marks. The customer who knows the difference will know.

The customer who does not know the difference will continue to enjoy the food. The food does not require the customer to know the difference. The discipline is for the brand to bear, not for the customer to perform. That is, I think, the correct relationship.

A small note on observance

I will close with a small observation, because some readers will want to know what I personally do.

I observe at the Beit Yosef tier. I have since I was old enough to understand what my father was doing. I keep three knives in my Manhattan kitchen. The Sabbath one is a simple Wüsthof carbon steel blade that I bought in Paris in 2014 and have used only on Friday nights and on the High Holidays. It has its own drawer. It has its own cutting board. It will, when I am a grandfather, be passed to my own grandchild with the same instruction my father gave me: We are different. Different from people who have only one knife.

This is not a brand position. This is a life. The brand position emerges from the life, not the other way around. Releone is what happens when someone who lives this discipline tries to bring the same discipline to a luxury food house that the world has not yet seen.

I am, on most days, surprised that no one has done this before.

This is the sixth piece in the Releone Almanac launch corpus. The OU certifying agency is at /almanac/ou. The Beit Yosef discipline is documented at /almanac/beit-yosef-tradition. Subscribe to receive future Almanac pieces in print: /almanac/subscribe.

— Brandon J. Sellam Paris · Livorno · New York Depuis MCMXCV