Aron Streit
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| Private | |
| Industry | Food |
| Founded | New York City, U.S. (1916) |
| Founder | Aron Streit |
| Headquarters | New York City, United States |
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Area served
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United States Other International Cities |
| Products | Kosher Food Products |
| Website | StreitsMatzo.com |
Aron Streit, Inc. (sold under the name Streit's) is a kosher food company based in New York City, best known for its product Streit's Matzo. It is the only family-owned and operated matzo company in the United States and distributes matzo in select international markets. It holds about 40 percent of the United States matzo market with its major competitor, New Jersey based Manischewitz.
The factory follows strict kosher laws. Only Shomer Shabbat (Sabbath-observing) Jews are allowed to touch the dough. However, once the dough is baked, people of any religion are allowed to touch the matzo. The entire process of making the matzo is under Rabbinic supervision. In particular, they time the matzo making process, checking to see it does not exceed eighteen minutes. Otherwise, the batch would be considered not kosher for Passover and discarded.
The company was founded in 1916 by Aron Streit, a Jewish immigrant from Austria. Its first factory was on Pitt Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There, Streit and his business associate Rabbi Weinberger made each piece of matzo by hand. In 1925, with the growing number of Jewish immigrants congregating in the Lower East Side, Streit, along with his two sons, moved his business to nearby Rivington Street. Soon thereafter they bought the adjacent buildings, where the company operated for 90 years, before moving in 2015.
Streit's 47,000-square-foot (4,400 m2) matzo factory, along with Katz’s Delicatessen and Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery, was a surviving piece of the Lower East Side's Jewish heritage. At the turn of the 20th century Jews, along with other European Immigrants, were crammed into the many unsanitary tenements of the Lower East Side. In 1915 they made up 60 percent of the Lower East Side population. Because of the large Jewish presence, Jewish centric businesses like Streit's opened and flourished. However, because of the poor living conditions, as soon as they financially could, many Jewish families moved out of the tenements to new areas of industry in New York City, namely uptown and Brooklyn, slowly making Streit's a relic of the past.
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