An Internationally recognised Halal Body said that non-alcohol drinks were not necessarily halal (allowed under Sharia law), and still needed Halal certification.

“They sometimes contain ingredients like taurine, pepsin, gelatin, active carbon or coating,” executive director of the Cosmetics and Drugs Monitoring Institution at the Halal Body, Lukmanul Hakim, said as quoted by Antara news agency.

He said taurine, often found in energy drinks, was mostly derived from pig gall.

Other additives, included pepsin, gelatin, clarifiers and stabilizers to make drinks look clear and cloudifiers to make juice look cloudy, came from animals, Lukman said.

Active carbon and flavors for fruity aromas came from animals.

Ingredients from pigs were the most popular among producers because pigs bred fast, and were easily available and low-cost.

“Pigs have a genetic structure closest to human beings. The chromosome structure between pigs and humans is distinguished only by one strip,” Lukman went on.

Therefore, he said, drinks like energy drinks, tea, packaged coffee drinks, soft drinks and packaged juice, had to get halal certification.

In the same discussion, the halal committee chairman at drugs and food producer PT Bintang Toedjoe, Dedi Suherman, said his product, an energy drink, was the first such beverage to acquire halal certification, starting from its taurine, sweetener, vitamins and flavouring.

He said he did not know what kind of animals provided the ingredients used by his factory. Lukman argued it was not necessary to know every single ingredient.

“The suppliers do not publish the components because one ingredient could have hundreds of components,” he said. “We just check the formula, whether it has contents that are halal or not,” he said.

Local ice cream companies have stopped producing their rum and raisin flavor because the Halal Body considered the flavouring non-halal.

In January, the Halal Body reported that from around 30,000 products circulating in the country, 80 percent had no halal certification. With the free trade agreements, the country would see an increase in imported products, thus posing a challenge to the Halal Body to improve its halal certification process, as requested by producers and importers.

The APPHI has complained, saying that many foreign producers were unhappy about the Halal Bodies policy to refuse or to recognize halal certification obtained in other countries.

APPHI also said that the Halal Body and producers should improve the trust between them because in the past the Halal Body tended to find fault with what the producers were doing.

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta