IN 2024, I had several opportunities to visit Indonesia, traveling to Bali, Yogyakarta, Malang, and Jakarta. One of the first things I noticed when I used Grab to order food was the availability of a specific category for Halal food options.
As someone who studied the evolution of the Philippine Halal industry for my PhD, I remember thinking that I wished the Philippines could have something similar. Finding Halal food should not have to depend on knowing which restaurants are Muslim-owned, asking around, or searching through scattered lists of establishments. A digital platform could make the process considerably easier.
I never thought that wish would eventually come to fruition.
On September 9, Grab Philippines and the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos (NCMF) Region XI signed a memorandum of understanding in Davao City to make Halal food discovery on GrabFood easier and more reliable. The pilot will allow users to identify Halal-certified and Muslim-owned restaurants through enhanced search and filtering features. Under the arrangement, merchants must be vetted through Halal certification bodies before being tagged appropriately, while a Philippine Halal logo will be displayed on qualified establishments. Grab is also cleaning up inaccurate or unsupported uses of the word “Halal” in restaurant names.
At first glance, this may seem like another feature added to a food-delivery application. But the significance of the initiative goes beyond convenience.
Grab’s entry into the Philippine Halal industry is economically important because it brings one of the country’s major digital platforms into an economic ecosystem that remains relatively fragmented.
In the past, I knew of only a few small e-commerce platforms specifically catering to Muslim Filipinos looking for Halal food and other commodities. These platforms play an important role in addressing a market that mainstream e-commerce has often overlooked. But their reach remains limited.
Grab is different.
Its participation can significantly expand the digital marketplace for Halal products because it connects Halal merchants with a much larger consumer base. More importantly, it can make Halal consumption more visible to consumers who may not previously have actively searched for Halal products.
This matters because Halal is no longer simply a niche market for Muslim consumers. The global Halal economy encompasses food, tourism, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, modest fashion, finance, and other sectors. In the Philippines, the challenge has never been simply the absence of businesses capable of producing Halal products. It has also been the difficulty of connecting these businesses with consumers and markets.
This is where digital platforms can make a difference.
The Grab initiative addresses one of the most persistent problems in the Philippine Halal market: information asymmetry. A restaurant may claim that its food is Halal, but consumers have traditionally had few convenient ways of determining whether that claim is supported by an appropriate certification.
The problem is not trivial. Halal certification is ultimately about trust. For Muslim consumers, the question is not simply whether a restaurant serves a particular type of food, but whether the food, ingredients, preparation, and handling comply with Halal requirements.
By requiring verification before merchants are tagged as Halal, Grab can help strengthen consumer confidence while also giving legitimate Halal-certified businesses greater visibility.
There is another important implication: Halal tourism.
For years, Muslim travelers visiting the Philippines have faced difficulties locating Halal-certified food, Muslim-friendly restaurants, and hospitality establishments. This has been one of the structural weaknesses of Philippine tourism as the country tries to attract more visitors from Muslim-majority countries.
The Department of Tourism has made considerable progress in addressing this problem. Under the leadership of Tourism Undersecretary Myra Paz Valderrosa-Abubakar, the DOT expanded its Muslim-friendly tourism programs, including guidelines for accommodation establishments and efforts to increase access to Halal food and prayer facilities. The Philippines was recognized as the Emerging Muslim-Friendly Destination of the Year among non-Organization of Islamic Cooperation countries at the Halal in Travel Global Summit in 2023 and retained the recognition in 2024. In 2025, Valderrosa-Abubakar herself was named Halal Travel Personality of the Year for her work in advancing Muslim-friendly tourism.
The Grab initiative can complement these efforts.
Tourism is not simply about having beautiful destinations. It is also about reducing the practical difficulties travelers encounter when they arrive. A Muslim tourist may be interested in visiting Davao, Boracay or Cebu, but the tourism experience becomes considerably more complicated if finding Halal food requires extensive research.
A digital platform that allows travelers to search for verified Halal establishments can therefore become part of the tourism infrastructure itself.
This makes Davao City an especially appropriate place to pilot the initiative.
Economically, Davao is already one of the most important growth centers in Mindanao. The city recorded the fastest economic growth among the provinces and highly urbanized cities in the Davao Region in 2024, expanding by 7.9 percent compared with the previous year. The Davao Region itself grew by 5.1 percent in 2025, reaching an economy valued at about P1.14 trillion and retaining its position as Mindanao’s largest regional economy. Services account for 62.1 percent of the regional economy.
A growing, service-oriented economy naturally creates opportunities for tourism, retail, hospitality, and investment. Making the city more accessible to Muslim consumers and visitors can therefore be seen not simply as an act of accommodation, but as part of a broader strategy for economic expansion.
There is also a historical reason why Davao is an appropriate pilot site.
Davao City was among the early local governments in the Philippines to recognize that Halal could have economic as well as social significance. In June 2010, the city enacted Ordinance No. 0447-10, requiring restaurants, fast-food chains, eateries, food stalls, canteens, and other food establishments using the word “Halal” in their premises or business names to obtain Halal accreditation from the city’s Muslim Ulama Halal Certifying and Monitoring Agency.
The ordinance was significant because it sought to address a very practical problem: the misuse of the Halal label. A business could not simply print the Arabic word for Halal, put it on a signboard, and expect consumers to accept the claim without verification.
This local initiative also has a place in the broader and sometimes complicated history of Philippine Halal regulation.
For years, the development of the Philippine Halal industry was complicated by disputes over who had the authority to certify Halal products and establishments. These involved government agencies and private Halal certification bodies, reflecting a deeper question over the relationship between religious authority, government regulation, and commercial certification.
The creation of the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos through Republic Act No. 9997 in 2010 gave the national government a clearer institutional role in developing the Philippine Halal industry and accrediting Halal-certifying entities. The law explicitly mandated the NCMF to promote and develop the Philippine Halal industry and accredit Halal-certifying entities and bodies.
Davao’s experience therefore illustrates an interesting pattern in Philippine policymaking. While national stakeholders were still working through questions of regulatory authority, the city government had already attempted to create a local mechanism for addressing consumer protection and Halal integrity.
Eventually, the city’s system had to be aligned with the national regulatory framework. But its earlier intervention demonstrates how local governments can sometimes respond to economic and regulatory gaps before national institutions have fully resolved them.
Davao has continued to build on that experience.
The city now hosts the annual Philippine Halal Trade and Tourism Expo, which has become a major networking platform for Halal stakeholders from the Philippines and the wider BIMP-EAGA region, bringing together international Halal stakeholders, local entrepreneurs and community advocates, with activities covering trade, business-to-business networking, tourism promotion, investment matching, and innovation.
What is particularly important is that these activities are not confined to Muslim-owned enterprises. The Philippine Halal industry increasingly involves Christian and Muslim entrepreneurs, government agencies, academic institutions and foreign business partners.
This is precisely why Grab’s participation is significant.
The Halal economy should not be understood as an economic space exclusively for Muslims. It is a market in which Muslim consumers have specific religious requirements, while businesses, regardless of the owner’s religion, can participate by meeting those requirements.
The Grab-NCMF partnership potentially brings these two sides closer together. It can help Muslim consumers find trusted Halal establishments while giving businesses another incentive to secure proper certification and participate in the Halal market.
In light of this development, the Grab-NCMF partnership comes amid renewed regional attention to the developmental promise of Halal as a driver of economic growth. This was underscored by the recently concluded 3rd BIMP-EAGA Trade, Investment and Halal Industry Conference in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, on September 2, which brought together government leaders, policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs and Halal certification authorities to strengthen cross-border cooperation in the Halal industry across Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Brian U. Doce is a part-time faculty member of the Department of International Studies of De La Salle University (DLSU) and a Visiting Doctoral Fellow of the DLSU’s Southeast Asia Research Hub. He recently defended his thesis entitled “The political economy of Halal certification regulation in the Philippines” for his Doctor of Philosophy (Politics) at Murdoch University, Australia.
