Over 100 million plastic pickle pins have been handed out by the H. J. Heinz company since they were first introduced as a marketing promotion at the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. This particular pin was distributed at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

Although H. J. Heinz was not Jewish, the company he founded was the first major company that included kosher certification on its products. 

In the early 1900s, the combination of industrial food systems and the development of new food ingredients made it difficult for Jewish consumers to know which foods were kosher. This changed when Abraham Goldstein, a New York based chemist who worked for the Orthodox Union (or OU, a national organization of Orthodox synagogues), spearheaded a division whose objective was to inspect food production processes to give assurances to the public that the foods produced were kosher.

In 1927, Goldstein approached the Heinz company which........

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