SUMMARY
Halal food fraud is a bigger problem than most shoppers realize. Globally, food fraud costs the industry more than USD 40 billion every year, and halal products are far from immune. Incidents like Malaysia’s infamous “Meat Cartel” scandal, where non-halal meat was repackaged and sold as certified halal beef, have shaken consumer trust badly. Meanwhile, most halal certification still relies on paper documents and occasional manual audits — a system that’s slow, easy to fake, and nearly impossible to verify in real time.
A team of researchers from Multimedia University in Malaysia and Telkom University in Indonesia set out to fix that gap. They built HalalChain, a blockchain-based system that tracks halal products at every stage of their journey, from raw materials through manufacturing, shipping, and finally the retail shelf. Unlike paper certificates, which can be photocopied or reused on the wrong batch, blockchain records can’t be secretly altered once they’re written. Consequently, every step a product takes becomes a permanent, tamper-evident entry that anyone can check.
The system works through three “smart contracts” — self-executing pieces of code — that automatically enforce who can do what. A supplier can only log raw materials. A manufacturer can only record production steps. Logistics providers handle shipping updates, and retailers confirm the product has arrived on shelves. Nobody can skip a step or record something outside their role, because the blockchain itself blocks it. Additionally, the system keeps a fast, searchable copy of every record in a regular database, so shoppers don’t have to wait for slow blockchain queries just to check a product’s history.
For everyday consumers, the payoff is simple: scan a QR code on the package, and see the product’s entire journey, along with a “verified” or “mismatch” badge showing whether the digital record lines up with what’s stored on the blockchain. The researchers tested the system extensively, running 107 automated checks covering everything from unauthorized access attempts to certificate expiry — and every single test passed. They also estimated running costs, finding that logging a single event costs a fraction of a cent on cost-efficient blockchain networks, though it climbs to several dollars on pricier networks like Ethereum’s main network.
To gauge whether shoppers would actually want this, the team surveyed 40 Malaysian consumers. The results were encouraging: on a five-point scale, people rated their interest in blockchain-verified halal food at an average of 4.10, with particularly strong agreement that Malaysia needs a digital halal verification system.
Still, the researchers are upfront about one major limitation: blockchain can prove a digital record hasn’t been tampered with, but it cannot yet prove that the QR code on a package is genuinely attached to the right physical product. Closing that “physical-to-digital” gap, they say, is the next challenge to solve.
Why Halal Certification Has a Trust Problem
The global halal food market ranks among the fastest-growing segments of the entire food industry, fueled by a growing Muslim population and rising demand for verified ethical products. However, growth alone doesn’t guarantee trust. Today’s halal certification largely depends on paper documents and periodic manual inspections, and that dependence creates real vulnerabilities. A physical certificate can be photocopied, reused on an uncertified batch, or simply forged — a practice researchers call “certificate hopping.”
Modern supply chains make the problem worse. A single processed food item might contain ingredients sourced from five different countries, passing through multiple logistics providers before it ever reaches a store shelf. Consumers often describe this tangled process as a “black box,” since buyers have far less information about a product’s true history than the sellers do. Economists call this imbalance “information asymmetry,” and it opens the door to shortcuts — cheaper non-halal ingredients, lax hygiene standards, or mislabeled batches that slip through unnoticed.
These aren’t hypothetical risks either. Malaysia’s “Meat Cartel” scandal, in which non-halal meat was repackaged and sold as certified halal beef, badly damaged public confidence. Globally, food fraud costs the industry more than USD 40 billion annually, according to a widely cited PwC estimate. Against that backdrop, the research team decided blockchain technology’s core strengths — permanence, transparency, and decentralization — were worth testing against a real-world halal supply chain.
Building HalalChain: How the System Actually Works
HalalChain runs on three interconnected pieces, working together like layers of a cake. First, there’s a website-style dashboard that different supply chain players — suppliers, manufacturers, logistics companies, and retailers — log into to record their part of a product’s journey. Second, there’s a server that checks who’s allowed to do what before anything gets recorded. Third, and most importantly, there’s the blockchain itself: a shared, permanent ledger that nobody can quietly edit after the fact.
What makes HalalChain distinctive is its “dual-storage” design. Every time someone logs an event — say, a shipment leaving a warehouse — the system writes that record to the blockchain first, waits for confirmation, and only then saves a matching copy in a fast, searchable database. This order matters. If the blockchain write fails, nothing gets saved at all, avoiding half-finished records. If the database copy somehow goes missing afterward, the system’s built-in checker catches the mismatch and flags it for a human to fix.
Underneath, three “smart contracts” — self-executing code deployed on the blockchain — enforce the rules automatically. One contract manages who holds which role. Another handles certificate issuance and automatic expiry, so an outdated halal certificate can’t accidentally stay valid. The third tracks every supply chain event and blocks anyone from recording something outside their assigned role. A retailer, for instance, physically cannot log a manufacturing step, even if they wanted to try.
Table 1: How a Halal Product Moves Through HalalChain
| Stage | Who Records It | What Happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Raw material sourcing | Supplier | Ingredients are logged onto the blockchain |
| 2–4. Manufacturing, completion, quality check | Manufacturer | Production steps and quality checks are recorded |
| 5–7. Shipped, in transit, received at warehouse | Logistics provider | Shipment movement is tracked in real time |
| 8–9. Delivered to retailer, available for sale | Retailer | Product reaches shelves and becomes scannable |
| Final step | Consumer | Shopper scans QR code to view full history and verification status |
Source: Giap, Neo, Teo, Mangruwa & Yuen, Electronics (MDPI), 2026
Putting the System to the Test
Building a system is one thing; proving it actually works is another. The research team ran 107 separate automated tests covering four categories: basic function checks, tricky edge cases like certificate expiry, full end-to-end scenarios simulating a product’s entire journey, and cost measurements for every blockchain operation. Every single test passed without a single failure.
Among the scenarios tested, the team deliberately tried to break the rules — having a supplier attempt to issue a certificate, or a retailer try to log a manufacturing event. Each unauthorized attempt was correctly rejected. Similarly, when the team revoked a halal certificate midway through a simulated distribution run, the system immediately and correctly flagged the product as no longer certified, exactly as intended.
Cost mattered too, since blockchain transactions aren’t free. Each operation consumes “gas,” a unit measuring computational effort, and gas translates directly into real money. The researchers measured every core function, finding costs ranging from roughly 25,000 to just over 213,000 gas units depending on the operation’s complexity. On cheaper, high-efficiency blockchain networks, logging a single event costs a fraction of a cent — around USD 0.0003 to 0.003. On Ethereum’s flagship network, however, the same operation could cost several dollars, making it impractical for routine, everyday product logging.
Table 2: What the Testing Revealed
| Test Category | Result |
|---|---|
| Total automated tests run | 107 |
| Tests passed | 107 (100%) |
| Gas cost range per operation | 25,365 – 213,684 gas units |
| Estimated cost per event (efficient network) | ~USD 0.0003 – 0.003 |
| Estimated cost per event (Ethereum mainnet) | ~USD 4 – 15 |
| Consumer survey respondents | 40 |
| Average acceptance score (out of 5) | 4.10 |
| Respondents who were regular halal consumers | 95% |
| Respondents who’d previously checked halal certification before buying | 45% |
Source: Giap, Neo, Teo, Mangruwa & Yuen, Electronics (MDPI), 2026
What Shoppers Actually Think
Building good technology means little if nobody wants to use it. Therefore, the researchers surveyed 40 Malaysian consumers to gauge interest, most of them recruited through university networks and social media groups. Notably, 95% identified as regular halal-product consumers, giving the results real relevance despite the modest sample size.
The findings leaned strongly positive. Respondents rated their overall acceptance of blockchain-based halal traceability at 4.10 out of 5, well above the neutral midpoint. Interestingly, the highest-scoring survey item confirmed that shoppers are already keenly aware of halal certificate fraud as a real problem — validating the very issue HalalChain was built to solve. Meanwhile, strong agreement emerged around two related ideas: that Malaysia genuinely needs a digital halal verification system, and that respondents themselves would be willing to try HalalChain if it became available.
Demographically, the sample skewed young, with 55% between 18 and 24 years old. Blockchain familiarity varied widely, though — only 12.5% described themselves as very familiar with the technology, while 42.5% had merely heard of it. This gap matters. It suggests that any real-world rollout would need genuinely simple, jargon-free interfaces, since most everyday shoppers won’t understand blockchain mechanics and shouldn’t need to.
The One Gap Blockchain Can’t Close Alone
Despite the encouraging results, the research team is candid about a fundamental limitation. Blockchain can guarantee that a digital record hasn’t been secretly altered. However, it cannot guarantee that the physical product in a shopper’s hand is genuinely the one that record describes.
Here’s the concerning scenario: a bad actor could print a completely valid HalalChain QR code and simply stick it onto an uncertified or substituted product. Because the blockchain layer only verifies the digital record’s integrity, it would have no way of detecting that swap. In the researchers’ own words, the system “secures the digital chain of custody,” but the “physical–digital binding” between a QR code and its product remains “a separate trust assumption.”
Closing this gap will likely require technology beyond blockchain itself. The researchers point toward tamper-evident packaging, specialized hardware fingerprints called physical unclonable functions, or small sensor tags cryptographically bound to a product at the moment of certification. Each of these approaches could, in principle, plug into HalalChain’s existing framework — though building and testing that integration remains future work rather than a finished solution.
Why This Matters Beyond One University Project
Ultimately, HalalChain represents a working prototype rather than a finished commercial product, and its authors are clear about that distinction. The system was tested on a local development environment rather than a live public blockchain network, meaning real-world costs and speeds haven’t been confirmed under production conditions. Nevertheless, the underlying design — enforcing rules directly through blockchain code rather than relying purely on trust in a company’s internal database — addresses a genuine weakness in how halal certification works today.
For an industry built on consumer trust, and worth hundreds of billions of dollars globally, that structural fix carries real significance. Whether HalalChain itself becomes the industry standard or simply proves the concept for others to build on, the underlying message is clear: verifying what’s actually in your food shouldn’t require blind faith in a paper label.
Reference: Giap, J.O.H.; Neo, H.-F.; Teo, C.-C.; Mangruwa, R.D.; Yuen, Y.Y. HalalChain: A Smart Contract-Based Halal Supply Chain Traceability System with Dual-Storage Architecture Role-Based Access Control. Electronics 2026, 15, 2647. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15122647
