Kosher Biltong in Florida

We make our kosher biltong in Ormond Beach, Florida — and we are stocked in kosher grocers in Aventura, Hollywood and Pensacola. This page covers where to find it in Florida, what local pickup involves, and what to do if you are nowhere near any of it.

Made in Ormond Beach

The Grub Company dries its biltong at 131B Business Center Drive, Ormond Beach, Florida — between Daytona Beach and Palm Coast, on the state's Atlantic side. Everything is made here in small batches, not imported and rebagged.

That matters more for biltong than for most foods. Biltong is at its best within weeks of drying, and a product that has crossed an ocean and sat in a distribution chain is not fresh in the way the maker intended. Ours is dried, sealed and shipped from one place.

Local pickup is available and usually ready within 24 hours. Order online, choose pickup at checkout. Call (877) 322-8291 if you want to check what is in stock before you drive.

Kosher grocers carrying us in Florida

Between them that covers the two biggest concentrations of kosher shopping in the state — Aventura for North Miami-Dade, and the Stirling Road corridor in Hollywood for Broward — plus the Panhandle, which is otherwise a long way from anything.

Stock lists change. The current one lives here, and it covers the other states too.

If you are not near one of those

Most of Florida is not, and it is not much of a problem. Biltong is one of the better foods to buy online: it is shelf-stable, it needs no cold chain, and a sealed bag arriving after two days in transit is in exactly the condition it left in. Free shipping on orders over $50.

The Florida kosher map, roughly

Florida is a long state and "near me" means something different here than it does in Brooklyn. From Pensacola to Miami is about 660 miles — further than New York to Cleveland — and the kosher infrastructure is not spread evenly along it.

Two things fall out of that map. First, the two dense corridors are both in the southeast, which is where our two South Florida stockists are, and between them they are within a reasonable drive of most kosher households in the state. Second, everywhere else, ordering is genuinely the better option rather than a fallback — a sealed bag arriving in two days is in better condition than the same bag after a ninety-mile round trip in an August car.

One caution about that map: it describes where kosher shopping is, not where kosher households are. Plenty of families live an hour from the nearest kosher grocer and have organized their week around a monthly drive to Aventura or Stirling Road. If that is you, the useful thing about a shelf-stable product is that it does not have to go on that trip at all — it can arrive at the house in the weeks between, which is exactly the gap a monthly shop leaves open.

Getting it to you inside Florida

Everything ships from Ormond Beach, which sits roughly in the middle of the state's east coast. Rough guidance rather than a promise, since carriers do what carriers do:

Free shipping on orders over $50; $2.99 to $3.99 below that. There is no cold pack and no expedited option, because neither is needed — a sealed bag is stable in transit and the seal is what is protecting it, not the temperature of the truck.

If a package is going to sit in a mailbox or on a porch in July, the sensible move is the same one you would make with anything else: bring it in when you can. It will not be unsafe if you cannot. It will just be happier inside.

If you are ordering for a simcha, a kiddush or a Yom Tov, order the week before rather than the week of. Not because the product is fragile — it is not — but because carriers do not plan around the Jewish calendar, and a Thursday shipment that slips becomes a Monday delivery.

Florida heat, and what it does to dried meat

Worth saying plainly, because it changes the advice here more than anywhere else we ship.

Biltong is hygroscopic: it pulls moisture out of humid air. Sealed, that does not matter — the bag and its oxygen absorber hold it at three to six months. Once you open it, Florida changes the numbers. In an air-conditioned house, an opened bag is comfortable for three or four days. In a humid room in August, treat it as one or two, and refrigerate anything you are not finishing.

The other local hazard is a car. A sealed bag left in a Florida car in summer is fine for an hour and not fine for an afternoon — heat moves moisture around inside the bag and the texture suffers. Take it inside.

Humidity by season, and why the advice changes in June

Dried meat and Florida air want opposite things. Biltong is hygroscopic — it pulls water out of the air until it reaches equilibrium with the room — and Florida spends half the year with some of the highest dew points in the continental United States.

Sealed, this is irrelevant. The bag and its oxygen absorber hold the piece where it was when it was packed. Everything below is about what happens after you open it.

The single rule that covers all of it: in Florida, the refrigerator is the default home for an opened bag from June onward. Elsewhere that is optional. Here it is the difference between meat that keeps and meat that grows something.

One thing to be clear about, because it worries people: a bag that has warmed up is not spoiled. Heat alone does not make dried meat unsafe — what governs that is water activity, and a sealed bag's water activity does not move because the room got hot. Sustained heat softens fat and dulls flavor. It is a quality problem. Moisture is the safety one, and moisture only gets in once the seal is open.

Hurricane season, and food that does not need power

This is the most Florida-specific thing on this page, and it is the reason a lot of local households end up with dried meat in the cupboard in the first place.

Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30, with the peak from mid-August through October. The part that shapes a kosher pantry is not the storm — it is the power. An outage that runs two or three days empties a refrigerator and takes the stove with it, and a household keeping kosher cannot solve that by picking up whatever is open down the road.

What a shelf-stable protein has to do in that situation is short: keep at room temperature, need no cooking, need no utensils, need no water, and stay certified. That list rules out most of what people put in a storm box.

Two practical notes for a Florida storm cupboard. Buy it before the season, not during. The week a storm is named is the week the shelves empty, and biltong keeps for three to six months sealed, so buying in May for a season that ends in November is entirely reasonable. And keep it sealed and buy small formats. Single-serve 1 oz packs are better in an outage than a pound in one bag, because without air conditioning an opened bag in a hot house is on a very short clock, and you cannot reseal your way out of ninety percent humidity.

The same logic covers the ordinary version of the problem: a shabbat that falls during an outage, a long drive inland, or a few days at a relative's house where the kitchen is not one you can cook in.

What is actually buyable right now moves week to week — we dry in batches rather than holding stock. The live answer is on the product pages themselves: Sliced Biltong 3 oz · Mini's 1 oz · Slabs 1 lb · Bulk 1 lb · Sampler Pack · Meat Candy.

Buying for a Florida household

The one adjustment Florida asks for, across all of those: buy the format you will finish, not the format that is cheapest per ounce. In a dry climate that trade-off runs the other way. Here, an opened pound in August is a pound racing a clock.

Snowbird season changes what is on the shelf

Anyone who has shopped kosher in South Florida in January and again in July has seen two different stores.

Florida's seasonal population swells from roughly November through April, and the kosher-observant share of that swell is significant — families with second homes in Aventura, Hallandale, Boca and Miami Beach, plus visitors over the winter Yom Tovim and Pesach. Shops stock to match, which means the widest range and the fullest shelves land in exactly the months when the humidity is also lowest.

Practically:

• Winter is the good time to try new things in a shop. Range is at its widest and turnover is fast, so what you pick up is fresh.
• Summer is the time to order. Range narrows, restocking slows, and a direct order removes the question of how long a bag has been sitting on a warm shelf.
• Pesach compresses everything. The weeks before Pesach are the busiest of the kosher retail year in South Florida, and anything not specifically stocked for the season can be hard to find. Buy ahead.
• The reverse is true for us. We dry in batches year-round from Ormond Beach, so what we ship in July was made in July.

Pesach, and the question people forget to ask

South Florida is one of the busiest Pesach markets in the country, and it is worth being precise about something that catches people every year.

Year-round certification is not Pesach certification. They are separate questions with separate supervision. A product carrying a hechsher all year does not automatically carry one for Pesach — that requires its own inspection of ingredients, equipment and facility against a different set of rules, and plenty of certified products simply do not go through it.

So the thing to check on any product, ours included, is not whether it is certified. It is whether it is certified for Pesach, for this year, and whether that certification is one your community accepts. Vinegar is the ingredient to ask about in a product like this, because its source matters at Pesach in a way it does not the rest of the year.

Ask us directly rather than inferring it from the bag, and ask early — the weeks before Pesach are the worst possible time to be establishing anything. Call or WhatsApp (877) 322-8291.

The related point, which is more cheerful: the weeks after Pesach are when a shelf-stable savory protein earns its keep. Kitchens are being turned back over, shopping is disrupted, and something that needs no kitchen at all is unusually welcome.

Day trips, parks and the road

Florida runs on day trips, and a kosher household on a day trip has a food problem that starts around eleven in the morning.

Theme parks, beaches, springs, ballgames and the drive between any two Florida cities all share the same shape: several hours away from a kosher kitchen, in heat, with nothing you can buy. The parks do have kosher options and they vary by park and by season, most want advance notice, and none of them help you at the moment a child announces they are hungry in line.

What travels well in this state is a short list:

• It cannot need refrigeration, because a cooler is one more thing to carry and it will be warm by two o'clock anyway.
• It cannot melt. That removes most of what people would otherwise pack.
• It should be sealed until it is eaten, because a half-open bag in a beach bag is a lost cause.
• It should be portioned, so one person's snack does not become the whole family's lunch by accident.
• It has to be real food, or it is just delaying the problem.

Single-serve 1 oz packs cover all five, which is the unglamorous reason they are the format most Florida families end up reordering. They go in a bag, they survive a day in the sun sealed, and they are the same thing at four in the afternoon as they were at eight in the morning.

For a long drive — Miami to Orlando, Tampa to the Panhandle — the same logic applies with more force, because the kosher options along Florida's interstates are close to none. This is the original use case for dried meat and it has not changed in two hundred years.

What to check when you buy it locally

Buying in a shop gives you one advantage over ordering: you can inspect it. Worth using.

• Color. Deep red-brown, darker at the edges. Uniform pale brown suggests heat drying rather than air drying. Gray is a bad sign.
• The seal. Intact, with an oxygen-absorber sachet inside. That sachet is what makes a months-long shelf life credible; a plain zip bag on a warm shelf is a gamble.
• The date. A pack date beats a best-before date if both are shown. Biltong is at its best within weeks of drying.
• Where it sits. A shelf above a warm case or in direct sun is a worse shelf than a cool one, and in Florida that matters more than in most places.
• The hechsher on the bag, not the word "kosher" printed by the brand.

Asking a Florida grocer to carry it

This works more often than people expect, and it is how most of our stockist list came about. Give the manager three things: the maker's name, that it is certified Glatt Kosher, and that you will buy it regularly. Shops stock on expected turn, and one committed customer who names the product is more useful than a vague suggestion.

If they are interested, point them at us rather than trying to broker it yourself — we handle that conversation routinely.

Why Florida has real kosher biltong demand

Two things overlap here that do not overlap in most states.

South Florida has one of the largest Jewish populations in the country, concentrated in Aventura, Hollywood, Boca Raton and Miami Beach, which is why the kosher grocery infrastructure exists at all. Florida also has a substantial South African expat community — people who grew up on biltong and have spent years explaining it to Americans.

Where those two overlap, biltong stops being a novelty and becomes a staple. That is the honest reason a small Florida town can have better kosher biltong access than a large city elsewhere.

Why there is a South African community here at all

It is worth a paragraph, because it explains why biltong is not an exotic product in South Florida the way it still is in most of the country.

South African emigration through the 1980s and 1990s went in a handful of directions, and South Florida took a meaningful share of it — the climate is closer to home than most of the alternatives, the Jewish community was already established, and one family arriving tends to bring others. The result is a population in and around Miami and Broward that grew up on biltong, knows what it is supposed to taste like, and does not need it explained.

That matters commercially in a way it does not elsewhere. In most American markets a biltong maker spends its energy explaining the category. Here the question is narrower and harder: is it any good, and is it certified? The second question is why we exist — there were people in this state who knew exactly what they wanted and could not buy it with a hechsher on it.

A note on searching for it

Searching the product name plus your city often returns national online sellers rather than local shops, because few local grocers list individual products on their websites. Searching the shop type works better — "kosher market near me" or "kosher grocery" plus your area — and then a phone call settles it in thirty seconds.

The short version, for Florida

It is made here, in Ormond Beach, in small batches, and local pickup is usually ready within a day. In the southeast, two kosher grocers carry it — Aventura and Stirling Road — and those two cover most of the state's kosher shopping between them. In the Panhandle, PensaKosher. Everywhere else, ordering is genuinely the better option rather than a consolation.

The one thing Florida asks of you that other states do not: respect the humidity. Sealed, it keeps for months anywhere. Opened, from June onward, it belongs in the refrigerator. Buy the size you will actually finish, keep the storm cupboard stocked before the season rather than during it, and none of the rest of this will ever come up.

Getting in touch

Call or WhatsApp (877) 322-8291, or email info@thegrubcompany.com. A real person answers.

More on what makes it kosher → · Shop kosher biltong →

We are a small operation and that is a feature here: if you want to know when the last batch was dried, whether a flavor is back in stock, or exactly what the current certificate says, ask and you will get a straight answer from someone who knows. Shops and simcha orders are the same phone number.

Common questions

Can I visit and buy directly? Order online and choose pickup at checkout. Ready in about 24 hours at 131B Business Center Drive, Ormond Beach. Call first if you want to know what is in stock.

Which Florida shops carry it? Kosher Kingdom in Aventura, KC Market on Stirling Road in Hollywood, and PensaKosher in Pensacola. The stockist list changes; the current one is on the site and covers the other states too.

Will it survive a mailbox in August? Sealed, yes. Heat affects texture and flavor rather than safety, because what governs safety is water activity and a sealed bag's does not change with temperature. Bring it in when you can.

How long does an opened bag last in Florida? Three to four days in an air-conditioned house, one to two in a humid room without AC. Refrigerate anything you are not finishing in the summer months.

Is it kosher for Passover? That is a separate certification from year-round certification and must be asked about specifically, for the current year. Call or WhatsApp us and ask directly rather than assuming either way.

Can my local Florida grocer order it? Yes, and this is how most of our stockist list happened. Give the manager the maker's name, the certification, and a commitment to buy it regularly, then point them at us.

Do you ship outside Florida? Across the United States, free over $50, and to Canada, Israel and the UK on a buyer-paid basis where duty or VAT may apply.