Halal Food benefits and challenges: A Mobile Application based technical Review

Halal refers to something that is "lawful" or "permissible" in Arabic, whereas Haram refers to anything that is "prohibited" and "unlawful". Halal food is rapidly gaining popularity amongst both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, with a globally estimated market of more than 415 billion dollars in 2015, especially amongst the health sensitive millennial who would not mind standing in long queues for hours just to get a halal lunch. This paper focuses on Halal food, its popularity and challenges, how consumers can identify if the food they are consuming is halal or not, and the creation and development of an application that will combine all the necessary features of a halal food app together in one. Towards the end, there is an analytic comparison between some of the most famous halal food applications available for download and what new feature can be added into them to make them more efficient and useful for consumers. The main aim of this paper is to develop an all-rounder application, which can be used by both Muslims and non-Muslims who prefer consumption of halal food alike, and for users to be able to access insight of the list of ingredients and the supply chain of the food article. We see that many of the halal food application although sharing a common goal have their own unique features to set themselves apart. A conceptual halal food application is proposed the combines major functions and features of the popular applications in a way that the user can have all the information together in one place. The user is able to access information from any place at any time and be able to locate nearby restaurants, groceries, or any halal premises that provide halal food and furthermore be able to attain list of ingredients or easily gain insight on its entire supply chain by scanning the QR codes provided on the packaging of food items. An extra feature is added to enhance user interaction, which will help users add in restaurants that were missed out. This will especially be useful for people while travelling so they would not have to worry about manually finding halal restaurants. In addition to this, an extra feature to allow users to add in restaurants in the future or any restaurant that were missed out.