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.
[1] It holds about 40 percent of the United States matzo market with its major competitor,
New Jersey based
Manischewitz.
[2]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 amount 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 still operates today.[3]
Since the start of the franchise, Streit's has prided itself on traditional values and customs. A big advertising claim that they have is "while others have sold out to large corporations, we at Streit's continue our family tradition of bringing you the best matzo and kosher food products for Passover and year round."
Streit's 47,000-square-foot (4,400&_160;m2) matzo factory, along with Katz’s Delicatessen and Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery, is a surviving piece of the Lower East Side's Jewish heritage.[4] 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, they 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.[5]
