The Journey of HaNa – A Halal Odyssey
I followed pain.
Not the poetic kind — the startup kind.
The kind that hides inside spreadsheets, regulatory documents, and late-night supply chain calls. I followed it using one of the oldest tools in the innovation playbook: standard exploration. Except this time, I wasn’t looking for a trendy vertical.
Mahmoud Darweash
Founder , HEXio
I was looking for what hurts quietly but CONSTANTLY.
And I found it in Malaysia the most powerful and structured halal ecosystem in the world.
Malaysia wasn’t just operating in halal. It was exporting it: the standards, the auditing frameworks, the governance model. A kind of halal diplomacy built not just on belief, but on systems and policy.
So I did something that didn’t appear on any tech founder’s roadmap:
I enrolled in a 7-day government-certified Halal Executive course.
I sat in a room with auditors, certification officers, regulatory experts. No laptop. No pitch deck. Just curiosity. I needed to understand halal not as a logo or a checklist — but as a living infrastructure.
My First Build — and My First Blind Spot
Right after the course, I built what I thought was revolutionary:
HalalGPT - an AI assistant to “ask anything about halal.”
It could answer “Is E471 halal?”
It could summarize fatwas
explain certification categories
and cite regulatory sources
It was SMART, CLEAN & FAST.
I showed it to 25 companies across the halal supply chain — manufacturers, exporters, auditors, advisors.
Their feedback?
“Nice!”
“This is a breakthrough.”
“Perfect.”
At first, I celebrated. That’s what founders do when the room nods. But deep down, I know it doesn’t work this way. let’s avoid early celebration.
Politeness is not validation.
People are kind when you ask for opinions.
But they become ruthlessly honest when you ask them to commit — to pay, to integrate, to change a process.
And when it came to that — nothing happened.
Not because the product was bad. But because it didn’t solve a real, painful, daily problem.
We Didn’t Ask for Features. We Asked for Fire.
I printed something no one expected from a tech company: A complaint form.
Instead of the typical product roadmap question: “What features do you want in the next release?”
We asked them to tear it apart:
“Being a visionary in the halal industry… why do you think HalalGPT will fail?”
“As someone running a certified halal business, what directions should we avoid entirely?”
“What’s the one missing feature that makes this useless to companies like yours?”
And the gates opened, Truth poured in.
Brutal. Insightful. Gold.
First thing is “I still can use ChatGPT for free”. the nightmare of most of the AI Companies. on top of that , We heard about audit pains, grey-area ingredients, compliance bottlenecks, and sourcing headaches. It wasn’t product advice. It was a roadmap to relevance.
The Consultant Who Planted the Seed.
One of the key moments came from
Norhaizam Md. Sani, a Principal Consultant
and one of the trainers during the Halal Executive course.
She gave us feedback that cut through everything we thought we were building:
“Forget about answering questions. Can your HalalGPT become a database of materials?”
She wasn’t speculating. She was speaking from field experience.
Consultants like her were often brought in just to classify ingredients — to help companies figure out if a raw material was permissible, haram, or critical (syubhah). And most of the time, the consultants themselves didn’t fully know — especially when the ingredients came from China, Japan, or Korea under trade names, obscure chemical codes, or partial documentation.
She loved the generative reasoning of the tool, but told us flatly:
“Don’t be general. Be deeply relevant. Focus on the related data that no one understands but everyone depends on.”
That stuck.
The Visionary Who Set the Direction
Shortly after, one of the course organizers introduced us to
Ts. Mohammad Hafiz Jamaluddin, Head of the Halal Integrated Platform at HDC.
A strategic mind with a rare mix of public-sector precision and private-sector urgency. He reviewed our feedback,
the prototype, the user complaints — and gave us a direction that made everything click:
“Focus on halal raw material sourcing.”
That was it. Because suddenly, we realized something important:
Everyone had been talking about raw materials — but from different angles.
Consultants spoke of ingredient classification.
Companies complained about not understanding supplier specs.
Certification bodies mentioned gaps in traceability.
Manufacturers were overwhelmed by unknown inputs.
The theme was clear: Raw material is the pain.
And nobody had solved it.
HaNa Was Born
We dropped the name HalalGPT. It sounded like a lab experiment.
Instead, we built HaNa — short for Halal Navigator.
Not a chatbot. Not a toy.
A compact AI system designed to help the halal ecosystem do what it’s never been able to do at scale:
Understand raw materials
Translate complex documentation
Trace ingredient sources
Match suppliers and buyers
Classify inputs quickly and accurately
From Prototype to Global Stage
MIHAS 2024 – The First Test
We brought HaNa to the public at the Malaysia International Halal Showcase.
She was clunky:
- 35-inch wide, 15 cm tall device
- Only supported English
- <75% accuracy
- <5,000 companies in the database
But people lined up. Even the Deputy Prime Minister tried it.
It was raw — but real.
Melaka International Halal Festival – The Real Launch
By December 2024, we had rebuilt HaNa from the ground up:
- 35 cm wide, 6 cm tall — portable and refined
- Database expanded to 8,500 companies
- Accuracy jumped to 85%
- 36 languages supported — spoken and written
- Business matchmaking was launched
- Expo assistant, where HaNa can assist your journey inside the Expo based on what you are looking for.
Suddenly, people didn’t just admire it — they used it.
Expo 2025 Osaka – Global Debut
In April 2025,
HaNa heads to Expo Osaka — inside the Malaysia Pavilion.
This version is our proudest yet:
20 cm square, 6 cm height — minimalist, elegant
Built to connect Japanese buyers with certified Malaysian suppliers
From a bulky experiment to a global trade tool, HaNa became exactly what we hoped for:
Useful. Specific. Transformative.
From Malaysia, to the World
HaNa is not a chatbot. She’s a compass — built to navigate the grey zones of halal supply chains.
HaNa Was
Born
from honest feedback
Shaped
by those who dared to criticize.
Guided
by those who believed in something bigger than software.
This didn’t start as a success story. It started as a failure we chose to listen to.
Today, HaNa stands for everything we’ve learned:
That the best ideas often begin as wrong ones
That criticism is a gift if you ask for it the right way
And that even in a space as structured and sacred as halal — AI can help us make sense of the unseen
From Malaysia, to the world.
Alhamdulillah.