For Muslim travellers, buying food souvenirs raises a question that is not always easy to answer: is this product halal, and who says so? In Indonesia, halal certification is issued by LPPOM MUI, and at the regional level the local MUI office can issue a halal promise certificate for small producers who are not ready for full certification.
A research team designed an application to track the halal status of culinary products sold at a food souvenir centre, so that buyers can check a producer's status from their phone. The interesting part is not the app. It is how the team decided what the app should prioritise.
The team used the Analytical Hierarchy Process, a method for turning expert judgement into weights. Five experts took part, giving pairwise comparisons between criteria, and the calculations were run with Criterion Decision Plus. Every comparison passed the consistency check, with ratios below 0.1.
The gap is the story. User friendly carried roughly three times the weight of the next criterion, which tells a development team where to spend its effort. A tracking app can survive plain visuals. It cannot survive a confusing flow.
The same method was applied to alternative strategies for the app, and the winner was ease of access, with a score of 0.249. That fits the criterion ranking: the experts wanted a product that a shopper can open and understand quickly, standing in a souvenir shop with a bag in one hand.
The study has clear boundaries. It gathered opinions from five experts in one city, between September 2015 and January 2016, so the weights reflect that panel and that moment. Halal governance has moved on since then, and a new panel might rank things differently. What holds up is the approach: decide priorities with a documented method instead of a loudest voice.
Sucipto et al. (2018). Halal Culinary Tracking Application at Food Souvenirs Center Based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Method. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities.
