Careful by design.
Halalens exists to answer one anxious question in the aisle — can I eat this?— honestly. That means being clear about what we know, what we don't, and never dressing up a guess as certainty.
The four verdicts
No prohibited or source-ambiguous ingredients — or a recognised halal certification.
Contains something permissible only depending on its source (gelatin, E471, enzymes, unspecified flavours). We never upgrade these to halal.
Contains a clearly prohibited ingredient — pork, added alcohol, carmine (E120), and the like.
Not enough legible ingredient information to judge.
How we keep it accurate
We start from the actual ingredient list — pulled from Open Food Facts, the world's largest open food database, or read directly off your photo — never from the product name alone.
A curated knowledge base of haram and mashbooh (doubtful) ingredients and E-numbers runs first, so the well-established cases never depend on a model's judgement.
A fast, low-cost language model adds nuance and reads difficult labels — but it can never overturn a haram or doubtful finding into halal. When the rule engine and the model disagree, we keep the safer verdict.
Every scanner can report a correction or ask a question. Reports flag a product for human review, so verdicts get more accurate over time — for everyone.
What we know — and what we don't
Where the data comes from
Ingredients and nutrition come from Open Food Facts, an open, community-maintained database whose data is contributed by volunteers and carries no accuracy guarantee — or from a photo of the label you take. Every result links to its source record and shows when it was last updated, so you can verify it yourself.
What “confidence” means
The percentage measures how sure we are of the reading — how clear and complete the ingredient information is — not a probability that the product is halal. A clear label with nothing ambiguous scores high; a vague list, a blurry photo, or an unstated additive source scores lower.
Recipes vary by country and change over time
A barcode can map to different formulations in different markets. We show the markets a record covers and its last-updated date, but a verdict is tied to the declared ingredients for that record — your local version may differ.
What we don't do (yet)
- We do not verify halal certificates against certifier databases — certification is shown as a separate, unverified signal.
- We do not contact manufacturers for product-specific confirmation.
- We err conservative: a wrongly-reassuring “halal” is worse than a cautious “doubtful,” so ambiguous sources are never upgraded to halal.
An honest limit
Halalens is a tool, not a religious authority. A verdict reflects the best reading of available ingredient data — it is not a fatwa. Manufacturers change recipes; labels omit sources; scholars differ on some additives. When something matters to you, and especially when a product is doubtful, please verify with the manufacturer or a trusted scholar. And when you spot something wrong — tell us. That's how this gets better.