For anyone who buys on origin— halal, vegan, clean-label or export— it is also a small headache. E471 can come from plant oil, beef tallow, or pork fat. Chemically they are similar; commercially they are not. Nothing on the label tells you which. Multiply that single uncertainty across the hundreds of additives in a modern factory, and you have the everyday reality of ingredient sourcing.

Buyers have stopped accepting " we don ' t know ". Halal retailers, plant-based brands and export customers all want the raw material named on paper, not guessed from a code number. Halal certification bodies such as IFANCA and the American Halal Foundation list E471 among their " questionable " ingredients and advise against using it unless it is verified as plant-based( Anees, 2025).

Here is the reframe worth making: that sourcing headache is an opening for the whole agri-food chain. Halal certification is the most visible reason buyers now ask where an ingredient came from, but it is far from the only one.

The winners will be manufacturers who stop treating alternative ingredients( e. g. plant, seaweed, microbial and synthetic) as a compliance or requirements chore and start treating them as a productdevelopment strategy. They will own shelf space in markets that keep growing.

THE DEMAND SIDE

Of these buyer groups— halal, vegan brands, clean-label retailers, and exporters— halal demand is the easiest to quantify. Halal food and beverages were worth about US $ 775 billion in 2021 and are expected to

By Noor Yuslida Hazahari

International Institute for Halal Research and Training( INHART) International Islamic University Malaysia

“ Alternative ingredients do not just close a compliance gap. They buy entry to several of the fastest-growing segments in food at once.”

exceed US $ 1 trillion by 2030, with Asia-Pacific( Malaysia included) accounting for about 60 per cent of demand.

Growth is not coming from Muslim consumers alone. Shoppers of every kind now read a named, plant-based origin as shorthand for cleanliness, safety and ethics( Grand View Research, 2022).

The same instinct is filling the plant-based, vegetarian and cleanlabel aisles, which draw on the same ingredient list: seaweed hydrocolloids instead of gelatine, plant and algal lipids instead of tallow, microbial coagulants instead of animal rennet.

Alternative ingredients do not just close a compliance gap. They buy entry to several of the fastestgrowing segments in food at once.

THE SCIENCE, IN PLAIN TERMS

Capturing that demand is not as simple as swapping in the plantbased version off the shelf. A credible alternative ingredient must meet four tests at once: the first two are questions for the supplier, and the last two for the factory. Miss one and the reformulation will not hold. Source— plant, seaweed, microbial or synthetic, with no animal-derived input at any stage of production. Processing— aids, solvents, and residues must be safe and meet the standard for the product being sold. Functionality— performs the job the recipe needs, at the dose the recipe uses. Cost— priced so the reformulated product still makes money.

Meet all four and the ingredient is traceable and sellable across halal, plant-based and export markets.

On the factory floor, the bar is simple: the alternative must do the job as well as the animal-based ingredient it replaces. Certification alone is not the test— if the bread comes out drier or the jelly will not set, the substitution has failed.

SPOTLIGHT

The most promising substitution for animal-derived fats, gelling agents and emulsifiers comes from two places agribusiness already knows how to farm: the field and the sea. On land, soy and sunflower lecithin( E322) is a long-established emulsifier, and certified plant-based E471 removes the tallow-or-lard question altogether( Anees, 2025).

The sea offers more. Red and brown seaweeds yield three hydrocolloid families— agar, carrageenan and alginate— each able to thicken, stabilise and emulsify( Liao et al., 2021).

Agar gels the most strongly of the algal agents, firm enough to set a vegan cheese; carrageenan stabilises dairy- and plant-milk beverages while replacing gelatine in confections and soft-gels; alginate does similar work, setting on contact with calcium rather than on cooling( Kezer et al., 2026).

All three share one decisive advantage— they come from seaweed rather than animal bones, and so remove the most persistent animal-origin dependency in food processing: gelatine. One caveat: carrageenan has drawn scientific debate over digestive effects( Liao et al., 2021), so a cautious reformulator may prefer agar or alginate.

THE BUSINESS CASE

The magic of one well-chosen substitution is that it tends to unlock more than one audience at once: Traceable source— A verified plant or seaweed ingredient is a document that requires onetime filing, not a doubt that needs chasing every batch. Clear labels— " Sunflower lecithin ", " seaweed extract " or " beetroot concentrate " reads better to a label-scanning shopper than E322, E407 or E162. Vegan and vegetarian reach— Gelatine-free and animal-fatfree products are automatically eligible for the fast-growing plant-based aisle.