Buddhist Thailand hunts for halal gold
Considering there are 1.5 billion Muslims around the world, I think this is a very good market.” Sanya Saenboon, the general manager of the five-star Al Meroz, which is Bangkok’s first entirely Halal hotel
From chicken and seafood to rice and canned fruit, the country has long been one of the world’s great food exporters.
Now a growing numbers of food companies are switching to halal to widen their customer base.
Against a backdrop of humming machines churning out butter, Lalana Thiranusornkij, a Buddhist, explains how her family turned their three factories — under the KCG Corporation banner — halal to access markets in Indonesia, Malaysia and in the Gulf.
But going halal sometimes required some clever workarounds, such as how to avoid animal based gelatin to make jelly.
“In the past we used gelatin from pork but ... we changed our gelatin from the pork source to be from a seaweed source,” she said.
Thailand’s junta has set the goal of turning the country into one of the world’s top five halal exporting nations by 2020.
Some outsiders might be surprised to see an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation embrace halal.
But Dr Winai Dahlan, founder of the Halal Science Centre at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, says Thailand was well placed to make the change.
Five percent of its population is Muslim and — outside of the insurgency plagued southern border region — is well-integrated within the Buddhist majority.
It was local Thai Muslims who first began asking for the country’s halal testing center, a business that scours products for any banned substances and has since boomed.
“Fifteen years ago there was only 500 food plants that had halal certification. Now it’s 6,000,” Winai told AFP as female lab technicians in headscarves tested food products for traces of pork DNA.
Over the same period the number of halal certified products made in Thailand has gone from 10,000 to 160,000, he added.
It’s paid off. The government estimates the halal food industry is already worth $6 billion a year.
As Thailand has quickly learned, there’s gold at the end of the halal rainbow.