Strengthening The Supervision of Halal Certification in Enhancing Customers Trust

Halal products are fast gaining world wide recognition as a new benchmark for products safety and quality assurance. Products with Halal certification are readily acceptable by Muslim consumers and are gaining popularity from others, due to the wholesomeness concept of Halal, which comply the Syariah requirements, as well as hygiene, sanitation and safety aspects. Unfortunately lack of monitoring on Halal certification has caused the public to question the validity of the products claimed to be Halal. Ignoring the Halal aspect in the production process and the high sensitivity of consumers towards quality and safety issues, consumers might shift to another Halal certified product. This study is carried out to highlight the loose supervision of the Halal certification panels over the Halal certificates recipients, conducted over a six-week period from February to April using a mixture of e-mail method of administration, traditional mail as well as self-administered drop-off methods. Results indicated that the regression equation with all the predictors is not significantly related to supervision, which point toward the need to look seriously on the supervision and control. In addition, among the four dimensions, only evaluation is a significant predictor of supervision (t = 2.105, p = 0.038). Thus, only hypothesis 4 is rejected because finding results show that evaluation is significantly related with supervision, showing the correlation between the four (4) independent variables with the dependent variables. This can be an important consideration when developing policies, standards and strategies for more innovative and value-
added services. The study has proven the need to have stricter supervision on Halal certification as many weaknesses in the present practice and the authority must have made suitable improvement to ensure the trust of people on our Halal certification of food products. This study highlights the weaknesses in the present practices and suitable improvements must be made.