Halal Advisor is your must have app as a Muslim in Australia
A new mobile application, Halal Advisor, has been introduced in Australia to help Australian Muslims search for Halal food in more than 3000 restaurants and cafes around the country.
When you open the app, it determines your location and shows you cafes and restaurants in the vicinity that offer halal food.
The app developer, Aladdin Moukhallalati, said the 2016 census which revealed growing population of Australian Muslim population motivated him to create Halal Advisor.
“I am a Muslim and always trying to find halal food to eat when I’m out at work or with friends socialising,” Aladdin told SBS Arabic 24.
Sharing the reasons behind creating this app, he said: “With friends and family we found it quite difficult to find halal restaurants without actually calling the restaurant and asking if they served halal food, so I came with an app idea that allow us to check if there is any certified halal restaurants near our location.”
“Having this app means I don’t have to ring up or walk into a restaurant and ask if there’s anything on the menu I can eat.”
The multicultural society of Australia makes it one of the best places for the app, Mr. Moukhallalati believes. “We are a very multicultural society, and doing an app like this is obviously going to help the Muslim community a lot”.
The Muslim community in Australia is the second largest community after Christianity. According to the latest census figures, the Muslim population in Australia has soared to more than 604,000 people or 2.6% of the population.
Surprisingly, the main challenge that the team of Halal Advisor faced was not a technical one but the negativity from the local residents.
“In Australia, there are many people who are against halal certification, so we have come across a lot of negativity when building this app, but it is only because the Australian public are not 100% educated on what Halal certificate is”.
After collecting the data, the app owner created a data base for the list of restaurants and cafes serve Halal food in Australia. The second stage was calling the restaurants and check if they still open to the public and still serving Halal food in their branches.
He said he hoped an even larger portion of the 640,000 people who identify as Muslim across Australia would use the app as a way of simplifying the eating out process.
Halal Advisor has more than 3000 cafes and restaurants across Australia that provide halal food to customers. The majority of those are based in Sydney and Melbourne.
