Halal Mark Track: How Saudi Arabia Is Digitizing Halal Certification

Quick facts: Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Halal Center — part of the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) — has launched Halal Mark Track, a digital platform that combines halal traceability with ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) compliance tracking. It was built in partnership with the Halal Product Development Company (owned by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund) and THIQAH, the Kingdom’s digital government services arm. The launch was first reported in late December 2025.

Can You Really Trust That “Halal” Label? Saudi Arabia Thinks It Has the Answer

Here’s an uncomfortable question nobody in the halal industry likes to ask out loud: when you see a halal logo on a package, how do you actually know it’s telling the truth?

The honest answer, for most of the industry’s history, has been: you don’t. You trust it. The paperwork behind that logo has often lived in filing cabinets, spreadsheets, and one-off yearly audits — easy to lose, easy to fudge, and nearly impossible for a buyer three countries away to check.

Saudi Arabia just built a system designed to close that gap.

What Halal Mark Track actually does

According to the Saudi Gazette, the Saudi Halal Center has launched Halal Mark Track as a system aligned with ESG standards, developed through an integrated partnership between the Halal Product Development Company and THIQAH. Food Business Middle East & Africa reports that officials describe the platform as a strategic effort to improve operational efficiency in the halal sector and open market opportunities for both local and foreign companies.

In plain terms: it’s a digital paper trail that follows a product the whole way — not just “was this certified halal,” but “can we prove, step by step, that it stayed halal, and that the company behind it meets modern environmental and labor standards too.”

That second part is the clever bit. Instead of treating halal compliance and ESG compliance as two separate checklists, Halal Mark Track fuses them into one. ESG is the language big money already speaks — pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and major global retailers screen suppliers on ESG criteria as a matter of routine. By folding halal compliance into that same framework, Saudi Arabia is signaling that halal should be treated as core to doing serious, modern business rather than as a niche religious add-on.

Part of a bigger pattern

Halal Mark Track didn’t appear out of nowhere. Food Business Middle East & Africa notes it follows a July 2025 pilot of Smart Flock, a facial-recognition livestock management system tested on six farms under the Saudi Reef rural development program, which tracks individual animals’ health and productivity through a single digital dashboard. Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) puts the Kingdom’s livestock at roughly 22 million sheep, 7.4 million goats, and 2.2 million camels — so this is infrastructure built for a national herd, not a boutique pilot.

Seen together, the two projects point to a clear strategy: digitize halal compliance from the farm all the way to the export container, and in doing so position Saudi Arabia as a control center of the global halal economy rather than just one certifying country among many. That ambition tracks closely with the Kingdom’s broader Vision 2030 push to diversify its economy beyond oil.

The catch nobody’s talking about yet

Here’s the part that will actually decide whether this succeeds: building the technology is the easy half. The halal certification world is a patchwork — Malaysia has JAKIM, Indonesia has BPJPH, the UAE has ESMA, and dozens of other national bodies each run their own standards, with mutual recognition agreements that shift and lapse unpredictably.

A well-built traceability dashboard in Riyadh only changes anything in the real world if importers in Jakarta, buyers in Lagos, and regulators in Kuala Lumpur agree to actually recognize it. Technology is the easy 80%. Getting rival certification bodies across the Muslim world to trust each other’s systems is the hard 20% — and it’s the part that has slowed plenty of ambitious halal-tech initiatives before.

So the real story to watch isn’t whether Saudi Arabia can build the system. It clearly can. It’s whether it can win the diplomacy to make the rest of the halal world plug into it.

FAQ

What is Halal Mark Track? A digital platform launched by Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Halal Center that tracks halal compliance alongside ESG standards across the supply chain.

Who built it? The Saudi Halal Center (under the SFDA), the Halal Product Development Company (owned by the Public Investment Fund), and THIQAH.

When did it launch? First reported in late December 2025.

Why does it matter? It’s an attempt to make halal certification verifiable and data-backed rather than paperwork-based, and to position Saudi Arabia as a hub for global halal trade under its Vision 2030 economic diversification strategy.