อ่านฉบับภาษาไทยได้ที่ Shariah Excellence (ภาษาไทย)
A while ago, the Central Islamic Council of Thailand asked us to look at something ordinary: chili-salt seasoning from street vendors.
Conventional testing had already cleared the samples. Real-time PCR — the standard method for detecting porcine DNA — came back negative. On paper, everything was fine.
We ran the same samples through digital PCR. It found porcine DNA.
Nobody had lied. The test simply wasn’t sensitive enough to see what was there. And that gap, between what a certificate claims and what is actually in the food, is the problem I have spent the last few years trying to close.
The trust problem nobody talks about
The global halal market was worth about USD 2.2 trillion in 2020 and is projected to reach USD 3.1 trillion by 2028. Thailand is one of the world’s major food exporters.
And yet Thailand is not in the top five halal food exporters. Not because we lack capacity, or ingredients, or factories. The bottleneck is trust.
Every halal export shipment needs a porcine-DNA test certificate. Two things about that certificate are broken:
It is slow. Conventional real-time PCR takes seven to twenty-one days. For frozen and processed food exporters working to tight shipping schedules, that is not a lab delay — it is a business constraint.
It is forgeable. The result arrives as a piece of paper or a PDF. Anyone with basic software can alter a date, a lot number, or a result. And once it has been altered, there is no way for an importing authority to check it retrospectively. There is no original to compare against.
The consequences are not hypothetical. Falsified certificates have led importing countries to re-test Thai shipments, reject goods outright, and place factories on watch lists. One bad certificate damages the credibility of every honest exporter behind it.
Two problems, two technologies
We approached this as two separate failures that happen to arrive in the same envelope: the test itself, and the document that reports it.
Fixing the test: digital PCR
Nanoplate-based digital PCR detects porcine DNA at concentrations as low as 0.001% — roughly ten times the sensitivity of real-time PCR — across raw meat, frozen products, and processed and canned foods.
It also cuts turnaround from ten-to-twenty-one days down to one or two days.
That sensitivity is what surfaced the chili-salt result. A less sensitive method does not return a wrong answer so much as an incomplete one — and in halal assurance, an incomplete answer is indistinguishable from a wrong one.
Fixing the document: blockchain
A faster, more sensitive test still produces a PDF that can be edited. So the second half of the work was making the certificate itself tamper-evident.
Each result is written to a public blockchain — Polygon or Ethereum — as a tokenized, immutable record. The certificate carries the full chain of custody: lot number, production and expiry dates, the sampler, the analyst, the manufacturer, and the product identity.
Before anything is broadcast on-chain, it passes a three-tier sign-off: operator, verifier, approver. The blockchain is not a substitute for laboratory discipline. It is what makes that discipline auditable afterwards.
The exporter receives a certificate with a QR code. An importing authority scans it and reads the original record directly from the chain. No phone calls, no email chains, no waiting on a lab to confirm a document it issued months ago.
Why blockchain here, and not everywhere
I teach decentralized finance, so I am accustomed to blockchain being proposed as a solution to problems that do not exist. Most of the time the honest answer is that a database would work fine.
This is one of the cases where it genuinely would not.
A halal certificate has to be trusted by parties who do not share a legal system, a regulator, or a language — a Thai factory, a Malaysian importer, a Gulf authority. A private database means asking all of them to trust whoever administers it. A public chain means none of them has to.
The certificate is not valuable because it is on a blockchain. It is valuable because no one — including us — can quietly change it later.
Where the work stands
We built a prototype scalable halal laboratory, designed as a container unit so it can be replicated in other provinces and other countries rather than centralised in Bangkok.
On 7 March 2023 we signed an MOU with the Islamic Committee to act as its delegated porcine-DNA testing service, with porcine lipid and gelatin testing to follow. Our team has been working on tokenized halal certification since 2019, and we are working toward ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, which is the precondition for the certificates to be recognised across borders.
The proposal was submitted to Thailand’s National Innovation Agency under its Food Security and Food Traceability track, developed with the Central Islamic Council of Thailand, At-Gene Co., Ltd., Ereky Co., Ltd., and the PSU Science Park Business Incubator.
What it is worth
Our estimates put export growth at around THB 50 million per year for participating producers, with a 10–20% value premium on domestic halal products that can be verifiably certified.
But the number I care about is harder to model. Halal is a claim about integrity. When the paperwork behind it becomes unreliable, the damage is not to one shipment — it is to the meaning of the word.
The thinking behind this work has since fed into the 2025 agreement between Ereky and PERWIRA, the Royal Brunei Armed Forces Veterans Association, to establish an Islamic Science and Halal Standard Verification Services centre in Brunei. The next step is regional: Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Middle East.
A closing thought
The chili-salt samples were not a scandal. No one was caught doing anything deliberate. That is exactly why the case stayed with me.
Most failures of halal assurance are not fraud. They are the quiet gap between a test that was not sensitive enough and a document nobody could check. Close both, and the certificate starts meaning what everyone already assumes it means.
This article summarises a project abstract prepared in 2023. The full proposal remains private; if you are working on halal traceability, certification, or laboratory infrastructure and would like to discuss it, you can reach me at me@wirisr.com.