Davao City and the whole Region 11 will have more business opportunity especially in food exportation as the Department of Science and Technology 11 will open its Halal Verification Laboratory.
DOST 11 Assistant Regional Director for technical support service Mirasol Domingo bared those Halal products have huge market especially in the Middle East countries which is beneficial to the country’s economy.
“We will grab the opportunity that is why we established this facility,” she said.
“This is a good opportunity especially to the entrepreneurs who are exporting or going to explore Halal food business,” Domingo added.
Domingo said the entrepreneurs who are into this business can use the facility to make consumers assured that the food they buy is really Halal certified.
“With the laboratory, they can really test their products and the buying public will be assured that food they buy has Halal certified sticker, is really a Halal certified,” she said.
The P47 million-project will be launched in the city on November 24 and the modern equipment will be showcased to the stakeholders.
DOST science research specialist 1 Rugaya H. Abdullah, one of the facility’s analysts, said the laboratory will have three equipment that will ensure that the product is really Halal certified.
Abdullah said there will be a machine that will detect the DNA of pork in a product using real time Polymerase chain reaction.
According to premierbiosoft.com, real time Polymerase chain reaction is a technique used to monitor the progress of a PCR reaction in real time. At the same time, a relatively small amount of PCR product (DNA, cDNA or RNA) can be quantified.
“Using this, we will be able to trace if the food sample is contaminated by pork or pork derivatives that even how small it is, it can still be detected,” she said.
She said the second equipment is a gas chromatograph (GC) which will be used to detect alcohol content in a food product sample.
GC, according to .shimadzu.com, is an analytical instrument that measures the content of various components in a sample. The analysis performed by a gas chromatograph is called gas chromatography.
“If we say Halal there is a certain percentage of alcohol content in all food products,”Abdullah said.
Abdullah said there are Arab countries that have set alcohol content standard and this will also guide the entrepreneurs what country are they going to export their products.
The last equipment is the Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometer which will analyse the fats and oils.
“With this equipment, we will be able to determine if the fats or oils come from pork or bovine,” she said.
Davao City Indigenous People’s Mandatory Representative councillor Halila Sudagar lauded the project of DOST 11.
“I’m happy with this because we can attract more Muslim investors, ” she said.
Sudagar said this will be an advantage for the city and the region in terms of business opportunities.
