Halal training happens issue-by-issue for UK food entrepreneur

Shazia Saleem used to dread the supermarket shop.

While many of her fellow student friends stacked their trollies with traditional readymade meals, her options as a Muslim were somewhat limited. Around a decade ago there was very little halal food available to buy in British supermarkets.

That gave her an idea: to start a readymade halal food business that produced the kind of dishes she grew up eating as a British Muslim, like shepherd’s pie and lasagna.

Saleem nurtured the idea while working for one of the UK’s most famous entrepreneurs, Peter Jones, and innovation firm ?What If! before starting her company, ieat foods, around 18 months ago.

Having no prior experience of the food industry, she put together a team to help her launch the enterprise, made up of both readymade food and halal experts.

Then she had to train the staff she brought on board. She currently has five employees, three of whom are Muslims and two are not. Everyone, including herself, needed to be educated as to what constituted halal. There are many differing standards in the industry and the business sought to raise the bar, says Saleem, 30, from Luton, England.

“Because we were starting from scratch with everyone their pre-knowledge was useful, but not necessary. The thing I needed from all of our team was A, a willingness to understand, and B, a willingness to commit to those values.”

And for ieat foods, halal training is not a box to tick or a course to complete.

“I don’t think you can do it justice in that way. What it comes down to is taking half an hour, an hour or an hour and a half, every single time a bigger issue comes up to explain the principles behind it,” she adds.

Saleem does not use corporate halal training programmes to train her staff – she relies instead on her halal certifiers and her own knowledge to guide them – but there are plenty of such courses on offer. They typically include elements like Shariah law and halal audit and certification, combined with more traditional elements like food safety.

But for Saleem, the business’s Muslim identify extends far beyond just food.

In 2014, during the earliest days of the business, when Israel and Gaza were locked in one of the most intense periods of their conflict in recent years, she made a decision: to donate 100 percent of ieat food’s profit to help Gaza.

As a Muslim business she felt it had a duty of care to help fellow Muslims who were suffering. But it took time to explain a decision like that to the team and investors, she says. 

“To be honest the people on my team are on my team because they believe in that. They believe in what I say. They believe in my values. They believe in what the business is here to achieve. It wasn’t a huge decision for them to come along with that.”