Chapter Fourteen:
Al Safa Halal
Creating a North American Halal Brand
At the end of 1998, I was contacted by a leader of the Muslim community in the Toronto area, who asked if I would meet him. I did, and he told me that he had heard that our company was shipping zabiha beef all over the world. He went on to explain that there was a shortage of halal meat for the fast-growing Muslim population in Toronto. For example, at his mosque, a local community member went to a farm on Thursdays and slaughtered a cow and some chickens for all the members to share. That member would set up a small storefront near the mosque, put up a sign, “Ahmed’s Halal,” and after prayers on Fridays sold the fresh meat that he had slaughtered the day before.
The community, the imam explained, needed a reliable source of prepared halal products, like beef burgers for example. I explained to him that we did not make products like these, but rather we sold the beef to others, who then mixed our beef with other beef to make burgers, etc. After he explained to me the need in the community, he introduced me to some of the other imams in Toronto, who reiterated the need for such products.
I decided to purchase a small machine to make halal burgers, and we made some frozen burgers and boxed them under the name “Canada’s Finest Halal.”
We decided to start selling them through halal grocers in the Toronto area. The imam took me to visit these small stores, and the store owners all said the same thing: they would love to sell these burgers in their stores, but they had no freezers. They only had refrigerators, which they used to store the meat that they slaughtered on Thursday to sell on Friday. They said they would put the burgers in their refrigerators and sell them out of there. When we left the store I said to the imam: “One cannot store ground beef burgers in a refrigerator. That would be a recipe to make your congregants sick!”
He said, “David, you are absolutely right. What we need to do is to sell these burgers at the Food Basics.”
Food Basics was the low-price supermarket chain owned by the A & P Group of Canada. The imam said there was a Food Basics very close to his mosque. He asked me to go to see Food Basics to find out if they would carry the products in their freezers.
I had never done business with A & P before because we did not do business at that time with supermarkets. I cold-called the A & P buyer who took care of buying for the frozen meat section and set up a meeting with him.
At the meeting I told the A & P buyer about halal – he had never heard the word. I explained to him, “Just as you carry kosher items to attract Jewish consumers, so too, if you carry halal items, you will attract Muslim consumers.”
The A & P buyer responded, “I am willing to do a trial of the halal burgers in twelve stores of your choosing. However, my stores’ freezers are full. In order to put your product into these twelve stores, I will have to remove something else to make room for your halal burgers. I will remove the slowest selling item from the freezers of these twelve stores, and I will give you twelve weeks. If after the end of the twelve weeks, your products are selling at least as much as the slowest selling item that I removed, then I will keep your burgers in the stores. If at the end of twelve weeks, the products are not selling as much as the removed item had been selling, then I will ask you to pick up the remaining product and the trial will be over.”
Then he mentioned one last thing: “In order to do this trial in these twelve stores, there is quite a bit of work to do at the store end. We have to enter the products into our system, make sure they scan at the register, get them into our inventory system, remove the other products, and stock your products onto the shelves. In order to do all that, there is a non-refundable slotting fee of $25,000.” Whether the product succeeded or failed after the twelve weeks, the supermarket chain would keep the slotting fee for their trouble!
Not expecting this, I stumbled over my words and I told the buyer I would get back to him. I left the meeting and called the imam. I told him, “Imam, you are not going to believe this. He wants $25,000 to try the burgers in his stores.”
The imam said, “David, I want you to make another meeting with the A & P buyer, and this time, I want to come with you.” So I did just that. I called the buyer and booked another meeting.
The next week I went to the A & P headquarters again, this time with the imam. He came in wearing full Islamic garb. He also brought a map with him that the two of us had prepared together. It was a map of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). On the map were twelve green pins which were the locations of the twelve largest mosques in the GTA and twelve red pins representing the twelve Food Basics nearest those mosques.
As we were walking in, the imam said, “David, this time let me do the talking.”
We walked in to the A & P buyer’s office, sat down, and the imam began speaking. He said, “Good morning Mr. A & P.” (He called him Mr. A & P throughout the meeting.) “At my mosque on Friday afternoons, we have three thousand people attending the prayers. These people only eat halal food. Your Food Basics is right down the block from our mosque. My people do not shop at the Food Basics because you do not have any halal food. My proposal is this: if you carry David’s burgers (he called them David’s burgers throughout the meeting) in your store near my mosque, I will make an announcement after the prayers telling my congregants that Food Basics now carries halal products, and I will encourage the congregants to go to Food Basics to buy those burgers. Now, when these people go to the Food Basics to buy the burgers, they are not going to walk in to buy just the burgers and leave. No, they will buy fruits and vegetables and milk and everything else they need. So for you, it is not merely the profit on a box of burgers that you will gain. You will gain the profit on a full grocery cart of a whole new shopper who has never been in your store before.”
The imam continued, “And if you put David’s burgers in all twelve of these stores, I will arrange with the other eleven imams to also announce after their prayers that their nearby Food Basics now carries halal products, and all those people will become new shoppers for you as well.”
Then the imam concluded, “But Mr. A & P, please drop the demand for the $25,000 fee, because otherwise, this project will never get off the ground.”
“Mr. A & P” responded: “You know, every year in North America, fourteen thousand new frozen food products are developed, and the developers of each one want their products to be on our shelves. But no one has ever come to me and said that just because you put my products on your shelves, I will bring you a whole new shopper who has never been in your store before. And that is a very powerful thing to say to a supermarket executive. Therefore, I will give you the twelve-week trial in these twelve stores without charging you any fee.”
The imam and I left and did the biggest high five of our lives. We were ecstatic!
The beef burgers came eight in a box, and there were twelve boxes in one master case. Each of the twelve stores ordered three cases for the initial trial, so each store had thirty-six individual boxes for sale.
We had a meeting of the twelve imams and they all agreed to participate. We printed up twelve maps, one for each mosque, showing where the mosque was and how to get to the Food Basics from there. We printed thousands of small copies, 4.25 inches by 5.5 inches. And that Friday, the imams all announced after prayers that the halal burgers were now at the Food Basics. I could not be at all twelve mosques at the same time, but I did attend one of them.
I do not know how many of the three thousand congregants went to the Food Basics after the prayers, but I can tell you this: all twelve Food Basics sold out of the burgers on that day!
That is when I realized that I was on to something.
Coming Up With A Name — And A Business
At the imam’s suggestion I formed a small advisory council of Islamic religious leaders and other community leaders to advise me on various aspects of the project. One of the things that they gave me advice about was the name. They feld that the name “Canada’s Finest Halal” did not have a familiar ring to it. I asked them if they had any alternate suggestions. One of them said, How about “Al Safa?” I said “Great! What’s Al Safa?” He told me the story of Al Safa mountain in Saudi Arabia. Muslims believe that Ibrahim (Abraham) brought his wife Hajar (Hagar) and son Ismail (Ishmael) to Arabia, between the two mountains Al Safa and Al Marwa. G-d commanded him to leave them there, and he obeyed. When Hajar began to run out of food, she went to search for more, leaving her child so that she could move more quickly. She could see her son from each of the two mountains, so she ran from one to the other, always seeking to keep her son in sight. Today at Mecca, the city every Muslim is required to visit at least once in a lifetime, there are two hills that Muslims travel between when they circle the holy Kaaba that is the center of Mecca. In memory of Hajar, the two hills are called Al Safa and Marwa.
The members of the advisory council agreed that all Muslims throughout North America, regardless of their native language, know about the mountain Al Safa.
I put together a focus group of Muslim consumers and asked them what comes to mind when they hear the words “Al Safa.” Although they were from many different countries and backgrounds, they all said that the name Al Safa evokes a very warm feeling.
And so it came to be that the name was changed from Canada’s Finest Halal to Al Safa Halal.
I put an e-mail address and 800 number on the box, and we received many calls and e-mails, mostly with the same theme. “Alhamdulillah [Arabic for ‘Thanks be to G-d’], thank you so much for making these halal burgers. My children love them. Please provide us with more halal items!” One theme which was especially prevalent was that their children did not attend Islamic schools; rather, they went to public schools. And after school their friends would all go to McDonald’s and have chicken nuggets. The Muslim children would come home and exclaim, ‘Why am I punished for being Muslim so that I cannot have McDonald’s chicken nuggets?’ So please make chicken nuggets that are halal and that taste just like McNuggets!”
With roughly the same population of Muslims as Jews in North America, and with no other halal branded product in North America, I was quickly coming to the realization at that point that Al Safa Halal could be a major brand, equivalent to Manischewitz and Empire all rolled up into one.
I also quickly came to the realization that it is very difficult to make chicken nuggets in a beef slaughterhouse. I had no experience with poultry at all and certainly no idea how to make chicken nuggets. I canvassed my colleagues in the beef industry and was fortunate to be introduced to a man named Steve Hahn, who worked at Cuddy Foods, the company that made the chicken nuggets in Canada for McDonald’s. Steve managed the McDonald’s account there and it is fair to say that there was no man in Canada who knew as much about making chicken nuggets and other further-processed poultry items as Steve did.
I also realized that it takes millions of dollars to build a branded food line in North America. Seeing this as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity, I put together a proposed business plan and presented it to my family. The slaughterhouse/deboning business was not doing well, and I saw no prospects for its improvement. My proposal was to sell that business, including the assets, for whatever we could get for it, and take those proceeds and invest them into this new brand, Al Safa Halal.
The amount that we could get for the slaughterhouse business was less than we had in it, and as a result, my family was not interested in pursuing that plan. Furthermore, the slaughterhouse business had gotten no better, and whatever cash there was there was needed for capital improvements. Thus, they had no interest in investing in a fledgling consumer brand.
Realizing that there was no point of me staying with Muller’s Meats, I decided to go out on my own to embark on this new venture. Because Steve Hahn had been hired by Muller’s Meats specifically to create a consumer brand there, and since that that was no longer happening, I took Steve with me to help create Al Safa Halal.
I needed funding to get the project off the ground, and I believed that the best place to get investors would be in the Gulf countries. I was fortunate to be introduced to many of the largest investment groups from Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Dubai, and I made presentations to them, but alas not a single one was interested in investing in Al Safa. They pointed out that the level of projected profitability was not attractive enough for them. This was at the time when dot-coms were booming, and these investors were not interested in making a reasonable percentage return on their money – they wanted five times their money in the “next eBay.”
One day I was visiting my friend Warren Cole in New York and he asked me what I was up to. I told him about Al Safa and about the fact that I was not having luck getting seed money from Middle East venture funds. He was intrigued and mentioned that he and the brothers he worked for could potentially be interested in funding such a venture. Warren set up a meeting for me with his bosses Daniel and Moshael Straus. These two brothers had inherited a huge nursing home conglomerate and were looking to make outside investments. They also brought to the meeting a friend of theirs, Jonathan Kolatch. They were intrigued by my presentation, and along with Warren, invested the seed money we required to get off the ground. They also introduced me to Irwin Schlass and Abraham Goldstein of Interequity Capital Corporation, an SBA funded investment fund, which took a share.
Between Warren and his group, and the SBA fund, we raised half of the money that we were looking to raise. It was enough to get us started, and in September 1999, we incorporated Al Safa Halal and set up offices in Cambridge, Ontario.
Steve worked on the supply chain and I worked on the customer base.
Our business model was to have all our manufacturing outsourced so that we would not have to spend money on bricks and mortar. We got our halal beef from MGI Packers. For the chicken, Steve approached Port Colborne Poultry and made arrangements with them for us to take over their plant for one day to do halal slaughter that whole day. We brought in our own Muslim slaughtermen to slaughter the chickens halal. Then the Port Colborne Poultry employees deboned the halal slaughtered chickens and we bought all the boneless poultry produced in the plant that day. Because we paid Port Colborne a premium for the boneless poultry, it was a win for them as well. At first we only went in about one day a month, because that supplied us with enough chicken meat to keep us going for a month. After sales started to increase, we went in more often. By the time we were several years in, we were doing the halal slaughter there on a full-time basis every day.
With the raw beef from MGI and the raw chicken from Port Colborne Poultry, Steve set up a group of manufacturers to make the finished products for us. For each manufacturer, we would set up a given day that they would run Al Safa Halal product. We would supervise the cleanup the night before, making absolutely certain that no non-halal product remained in the machines or anywhere near where our product would be made. Then we brought in the halal beef or chicken and supervised the manufacture of our product, making sure that there could be no possibility of any commingling with non-halal product.
To ensure the complete confidence of the halal consumer, we also contracted with a group called the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America (IFANCA). We had them send an independent inspector into the plant while we were making our products so that they could verify independently that the products were 100% halal. We also worked with them to design a logo, a Crescent M, for them to put onto our packaging to inform the consumer that the products were independently verified as halal.
We contracted the services of Grand River Foods in Cambridge, Ontario, to make our chicken nuggets, strips, and patties. Cardinal Meats in Mississauga made our beef burgers and Macgregor’s Meats in Woodbridge made our cooked meatballs. Windsor Marketing in London, Ontario, made our pizzas.
We began our sales of the products in the Toronto area at supermarkets Food Basics and No Frills. We also sold products to independent halal shops and to a couple of food distributors who serviced independent food stores. Sales began climbing.
The largest concentration of Muslim consumers at that time was, and probably still is, in the New York City boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. At that time the dominant supermarket chain there was called Pathmark. I arranged to see the Pathmark meat buyer, and as we did with our Food Basics meeting in Toronto, I made a map of the major mosques in their area, and superimposed on the map the locations of the nearest Pathmark. Pathmark agreed to a trial of the product, and it would be delivered to them via one of their frozen food distributors, Nebraskaland, whose warehouse and distribution center was located at the Hunts Point Cooperative Market in the South Bronx.
At that time our family went to Los Angeles to visit my wife Joyce’s sister, and while there I met up with my friend from business school, Paul Vogel. We were catching up and I was telling Paul about Al Safa Halal and about the fact that we had raised half of the money we needed. Paul suggested that he would be interested in investing, and also mentioned to me that I should set up a meeting with another of our classmates, John Pasquesi. Paul contacted John and set up the meeting for me. I met with John, and between him and Paul and several other people that John brought in – including Arthur Rock and Warren Hellman – and classmates Bob Horne and Dan Baldini – we were able to get the other half of the funds we needed.
Divesting of Al Safa
When Joyce’s mom passed away in March 2006, Joyce told me that she wanted to spend her father’s last days with him, however long that would be. Her father was eighty-four years old at the time and lived at the Polo Club in Boca Raton. We decided that we would move to Boca Raton for Joyce to be near her father. I knew that I could not run Al Safa from there, so we decided to sell the business. We hired Stevenson & Company in Chicago to run the process, and they ended up making a deal to sell the business to someone in Providence named Duran Nanjiani. He in turn arranged with a Sovereign Wealth Fund in Malaysia to fund the purchase of the business and the capital required to grow the business. The date of the closing was in August of 2007.
Just before the closing, the buyer announced that he required a few more weeks to complete his deal in Malaysia.
School in Florida starts in mid-August; thus, in order to get there in time for school to start, we moved to Boca Raton in August 2007, even though the deal had not closed yet, though the closing date was imminent.
On September 4, 2007, I flew up to Buffalo on Southwest Airlines for the closing, which was to take place at the office of Bob Olivieri of Hodgson Russ, our law firm in Buffalo. When I got off the plane, I had a voicemail and an email from Nanjiani. They both said the same thing, namely that the Malaysians had backed out at the last minute, and that the deal was off, with no chance of it being reinstated.
In retrospect, we came to realize that Nanjiani had no intention of ever closing the deal. He strung us along simply to get as much information from us as possible, so that he could start a competing brand, and in fact, that is exactly what he did.
Frankly, I was crushed and physically sick by the collapse of the deal. I now had moved to Florida and had a business in Canada. Our entire year of dealing with Nanjiani had totally taken our eyes off the ball, and I knew right away that it would take a very long time to put the pieces back together again.
For four years I commuted from Florida to Cambridge, Ontario, to run the business. I tried very hard to arrange affairs so that the business could run without me being there so much, but I was entirely unable to do that.
In the meanwhile, Kraft Foods approached us to buy the company.
As we were starting talks with Kraft, we were also approached by Engro Foods, a subsidiary of Engro Corp. of Pakistan. Engro Foods was interested in entering the North American market with their own products, and they felt that they could use Al Safa as an entry into North American supermarkets.
In the end, it was worth more to Engro, and after four years, on May 6, 2011, we completed the sale of the company to Engro Foods. That sale process also took a year, and it was a grueling and unpleasant process. What I found was that the buyers had a deep-seated belief that in any transaction there is a winner and a loser. The idea of win-win is simply not in their belief system. Having decided they were interested in buying the company, they basically spent a year trying to answer the following question: “If a Jew wants to sell us the company for X, then it must not be worth X, for if it were, the Jew would not be selling it for X. What is he not telling us that makes the company worth less than X?”
The fact is that we were not hiding anything from them. However, they hired Price Waterhouse, which came in and examined literally every invoice we had ever issued and every payment we had ever made, all the way back to 1999. After all that, which took a matter of many months, Price Waterhouse determined that everything was in order.
Changing the Relationship between Jews and Muslims
There was a very interesting corollary to my time at Al Safa. We encouraged imams and other community leaders to visit us, and in fact, over the years, many of the major North American imams, scholars, and heads of Islamic organizations came to visit. I became close personal friends with many of these leaders. From spending so much time with Muslims, I came to see how similar Judaism was to Islam, and also how different both of those religions were from Christianity.
Very often, I gave speeches in mosques and at Islamic meetings and conventions throughout North America. In addition to talking about Al Safa Halal, I often spoke about my view that Islam and Judaism were similar in so many ways.
Here is part of the text of the speech that I would give at such events:
One visitor to Al Safa Halal was a prominent imam from Washington, D.C., named Imam Johari Abdul-Malik. After his tour of our facilities, he came into my office, sat down, and said to me, “David, you and I are going to change the world.” I responded, “Imam, how are we going to change the world? There is so much fighting, so much hatred.” He went continued, “David, forget about the fact that all over the world people say they hate America. Actually, people want to emulate what is being done in America, whether it is wearing Levi’s or drinking Pepsi–whatever is done in America is considered to be cool. When people around the world see people like you and I embracing one another in public forums, speaking from the same platform, and working in public toward common goals – people will start to say to themselves, ‘If Muslims and Jews are getting along with one another in America, then there must be something to this.’ It is not that all hatred and fighting in the world will suddenly disappear, but it will have an impact, both initially and even more so as such behavior becomes more widespread and in the open. And long term, the impact will be large.”
The words of the imam rang loudly for me, and when I went home that night, I said to Joyce, “Perhaps G-d put me on earth for more than to just sell chicken nuggets.”
Although I cannot prove it, there is probably no Jew in America who has been in more mosques than I have – no Jew who has been in more imams’ homes than I have. I have also attended dozens of Islamic conferences and conventions, and even spoken at some. And because of this unique opportunity I have had, there are probably few Jews who have had a chance to get as close a view of Islam in North America as I have. And what have I seen?
At a typical Islamic conference, one can attend seminars with such titles as “The Problem of Intermarriage and How to Confront It,” “The Dangers of the Internet and Network Television,” “The Need for More Day Schools,” and “Family Purity Issues.” I have also attended conferences of Jewish groups such as the Orthodox Union. There I have attended seminars with such titles as, “The Problem of Intermarriage and How to Confront It,” “The Dangers of the Internet and Network Television,” “The Need for More Day Schools,” and “Family Purity Issues.”
In fact, I have found that Islam as it is practiced in North America is strikingly similar in so many ways to the way that Orthodox Jews practice their religion in North America. And it is specifically these two groups that are so similar. For example, if in the middle of this radio show, I were to say to the host, “I must leave for a few minutes now because the time has arrived for my afternoon prayers,” the Muslim host would say to himself, “That makes sense – I also have specific times that I have to say my prayers.” But a non-Muslim host might say to himself, “That is such strange behavior–why can he not wait until the show is over?” Similarly, if someone sees a Muslim woman walking in the streets of Toronto in hijab, they might think to themselves that the Muslim woman is forced to dress this way as part of her religion and they might feel sorry for her that she belongs to a religion that oppresses women this way. An Orthodox Jewish woman, however, upon seeing a woman in hijab, says to herself, “Oh, I understand that – I cover my hair as well – it’s a part of who I am, and I am proud of it.” Similarly, the Muslim woman can identify with many of the family purity laws observed by the Jewish woman, a lifestyle that would seem totally foreign to others, who have no such guidelines to live by. I could give you a hundred other similar examples.
So if in fact the two communities have so much in common, what is the extent of their interaction? Let me tell you two stories to illustrate the answer.
The first is the story I told in the preface to this book, about the woman who I had never met before, but after hearing a speech I gave at a mosque, said to me, “Mr. Muller – I really like you. I hate Jews, but I really like you. And by the way, you’re the first Jew I have ever met.” Later, I told my wife that I had a very successful day. She asked me why, and I responded, “Well, there is now at least one Muslim in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) who likes 100% of the Jews that she has ever met.”
Another story: one Sunday morning after prayers in our synagogue, the man next to me, whom I didn’t know well, asked me what I was doing that day. He was simply making conversation. I responded that I was giving a speech at a local mosque. When I said that, he jumped back, startled, and exclaimed, “What? You are going into a mosque? Are you not afraid that you will be shot?” I am not relating the conversation because he was anyone in particular – he was simply an average Jewish person who lives in Thornhill, Ontario, who thinks that if David Muller enters a mosque in the GTA he incurs a risk of being shot.
It is my belief that if more people from these two groups were to spend time with one another, each would find that at the very least the others are not nearly as bad as they thought they were. Actually I believe that, more than that, members of each group would find that they actually like the others. I believe that a Muslim family who comes to my home goes home saying, “Those people are a lot like us,” and that a Jewish family going to the home of a Muslim family for an evening would go home saying, “Those people are a lot like us.”
Furthermore, having spent time with many of the imams of the GTA and having met many of the Orthodox rabbis in the GTA, it is my belief that these people would have a tremendous amount in common.
So, in conclusion, I would like to propose that we form groups to begin such interactions and I would like to volunteer to begin putting the groups together, with your help. For example, let’s form the “Council of Imams and Rabbis of the GTA.” Can you imagine if we have a photo of a group of ten imams and ten rabbis on the front page of the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail, with a caption under it reading, “Leading Islamic and Jewish Leaders Announce Formation of a Council of Imams and Rabbis of the GTA to Discuss Common Concerns.” And let’s say that such a story gets picked up by the Associated Press and the photo and accompanying story is printed across America. These imams and rabbis are inevitably going to receive calls from imams and rabbis from all over– the rabbis asking the Toronto rabbis if it is true that they met with imams – and the imams asking the Toronto imams if it is true that they met with rabbis. And the leaders here will respond to them, “Yes, it is true, and you wouldn’t believe it, but they are just like us. And they are really good people and nice people. You ought to try the same where you are.” And then the idea will have spread across the continent and will receive attention across the globe, and who knows what good things will spring from that?
One of the questions I have been asked when presenting this idea to various leaders is, “If these people were to meet with one another, what would the agenda be? What would they talk about?” I believe that the agenda is in fact not that important, that the interaction itself would lead to the goal. Having said that, however, one of the items for an agenda could be, “Funding for Religious Day Schools in Ontario.” We know that full-time religious schooling for Catholics is 100% funded by the government, whereas there is no funding at all for other religions’ full-time schools, such as Jewish or Muslim schools. This seems really unfair, and seems like something that the Jews and Muslims ought to be working on together. I can think of several other items like this that could be agenda items, and I am sure that you can think of some as well.
This idea could spread far beyond just the religious leaders. What about a regular meeting of the Jewish and Muslim lawyers of the GTA, or the Jewish and Muslim medical doctors, and so forth? All with the purpose of fostering the inevitable goodwill that will arise from such occasions. And college campuses could be an excellent place to have such groups.
Imam Johari gave me another good idea, which is to have the two groups work together toward helping the poor and disadvantaged in Toronto, not necessarily the poor and disadvantaged of either religion. For example, Jewish and Muslim members of such a group might decide to staff a soup kitchen and feed the hungry once a month or more often. In such a circumstance, the Muslims and Jews will work together toward a common goal, and inevitably camaraderie between the two groups will result.
And slowly but surely, we will whittle away at the walls that make Jews in Toronto think that a Jew is in danger when entering a mosque, and that make Muslims hate Jews that they have never met.
Unfortunately for all of us, tensions in the Middle East are at a terrible point right now. And as such, it might be said, “This is not the right time for such an effort.” My response to this is that G-d has given us only so many days on this earth, and as so we have to get started today. There is, as the saying goes, no time like the present.
Al Safa Halal started because I was approached by Muslim leaders asking if I could fill a need in their community for true halal food products. First and foremost was always our commitment to hand-slaughtered zabiha, and we never veered from this. Secondly, were committed to giving back to the community and to that end we sponsored masjid events in mosques from coast-to-coast in the United States and Canada. There was probably no corporation in North America that has given back as much as ours did to the North American Muslim community. Thirdly, we proudly employed many Muslims on our staff who earned their living from Al Safa Halal and were proud of what our company accomplished during our short existence in building the market for true halal.
It was my intention after selling Al Safa Halal, to devote myself full time to improving the relationship between Muslims and Jews, specifically in North America, with the hope of the movement becoming worldwide. Alas, I ended up starting a new business right away, and I never did fulfill this intention.
Why Did Al Safa Not Grow as Large as I Thought It Would?
There are at least four reasons why Al Safa Halal did not grow as large as I thought it would. One is the Jewish ownership, the second is our overestimate of America’s Muslim population, the third is 9/11 and its aftermath, and the fourth is that most American Muslims do not keep halal, or at least not all the time.
1. Jewish Ownership. It is common in business that when a product or idea takes off, copycats come into the market to take advantage of that success. That happened to Al Safa Halal. Al Safa was the first to provide widely-available halal foods for the Muslim community of North America. Other firms brought competing products to market. The problem for the other firms was that they were never able to develop a unique selling proposition. They were not able to say that their products were more halal, because Al Safa Halal products were prepared to the highest religious standard. They were not able to say that their products tasted better, because Al Safa Halal products were all produced in world-class facilities that made foods for the world’s largest fast food chains. They were not able to sell the products at a lower price, because Al Safa Halal products were always priced competitively. Thus, these would-be competitors came up with a different selling point, as follows: “David Muller is a Jew, and all Jews donate money to Israel, and Israel oppresses Palestinians. Therefore, by buying Al Safa Halal products, you are aiding the oppression of Palestinians.”
I cannot say in definitive numbers what impact this had on Al Safa Halal sales, but I can definitively say that it had a large impact. For the twelve years that I owned and ran Al Safa Halal, it was day in and day out a huge albatross around my neck. Our competitors and other detractors made sure that social media was constantly abuzz with Jewish Al Safa, boycott Al Safa, and the like. It was a battle that we were always facing and were never able to win, and frankly, it was discouraging to me and especially to my Muslim employees, who bore a heavy brunt of these loud voices.
2. Overestimate of American Muslim Population. When I was pitching Al Safa Halal to prospective investors, I would always say that there are five million Jews in America and five million Muslims, and the kosher market is a billion-dollar industry; therefore, the halal market will also be a billion-dollar industry, and we will have first mover advantage, yadda, yadda. I got the figures of the Muslim populations from studies published by groups such as the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim American Society (MAS). I have now come to realize that one of the goals of these groups is to increase the profile of the American Muslim community, particularly in political circles. If someone is running for an elected position and believes that there are a large number of a particular group within their constituency, they are more likely to address the issues of that constituency. Thus, these Muslim political action committees have vastly overstated their populations. After eleven years in the business, I can say that these estimates overstate the actual Muslim population by somewhere from two to three times.
3. 9/11 and Its Aftermath. On the morning of 9/11 when the news was first coming out about a plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Steve Hahn walked into my office and said, “David, we had better pray that Muslims had nothing to do with this.” Steve saw the impact from the get-go, and he was so right. The instantaneous display of anti-Muslim sentiment in America cannot be overstated.
There were four different ways that this affected us: the first was the tremendous anti-Muslim sentiment in America following 9/11; the second was the large number of Muslims who left America after 9/11; the third was the dramatic decrease in Muslim immigration to the United States following 9/11; and the fourth was that the community and community members increased their assimilation and decreased their Muslim identity and identification following 9/11.
a) Anti-Muslim Sentiment Following 9/11: Our sales proposition to supermarkets was that if you carry our products, we will bring a whole new group of consumers into your stores who have never shopped there before. After 9/11 it was impossible to say this to anyone, because the response would have been, “We do not want to have Muslims in our stores because they will scare away the rest of the shoppers.” Some people in America were scared of Muslims after 9/11.
b) Large Number of Muslims Who Left America After 9/11: My employees and I spent a lot of time day in and day out with the Muslim community, and we determined very quickly that Muslims were leaving the country in droves after 9/11. Some left because they were deported. Many were in America illegally and quickly made the decision to leave before they were caught, arrested, and deported. It became harder and harder for Muslims to get jobs in America, and thus many went back to their home countries, their American dream having become harder or impossible to attain.
c) Dramatic Decrease in Muslim Immigration to the U.S.: After 9/11, it became much harder for Muslims to move to the U.S., thus ending the decades-long stream of immigrants from countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Firstly, the process changed such that it was much harder for people from such countries to successfully complete the U.S. immigration process. Secondly, the employment prospects for them once here were dramatically reduced, thus decreasing the allure of moving to the U.S.
d) Assimilation of Muslims in America: After 9/11, it was scary to be a Muslim in America. Thus, Muslims stopped attending mosques and stopped shopping in Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian grocery stores. Many stopped referring to themselves by names like Mohammed, changing to Mo or Mike instead. Thus, one of the last things they had to worry about was what kind of food they were eating.
The summer before 9/11 we had just bought a fleet of fifteen Honda Civics, one for each of our field reps around America, and each of them was covered with our logo and our tag line “Proudly Serving the Muslim Community.” As soon as the day after 9/11, our salespeople starting having people swearing at them, motioning threateningly at them, and even cutting them off on the road. They all said that they had to remove the signage right away, and we agreed, and they did.
4. Many Muslims Do Not Keep Halal. I designed Al Safa Halal using my knowledge of and experience with the North American Jewish community and observance of Kashrut. In particular, I knew that Orthodox Jews are careful not to violate the laws of Kashrut.
What I came to realize is that the Koran, the Muslim holy book, seems to have different passages that can be, and are, interpreted in contradictory ways. For example, one part says that you should only eat halal, whereas in another part, it says that you should eat halal when you can find halal, but that otherwise you can eat non-halal and just say a prayer before you eat the food and then you are okay.
Because of this, what I found is that most Muslims in North America eat halal at times, and eat non-halal at times. They have no religious problem eating a burger at McDonald’s with their kids and just saying a prayer before eating it. Therefore, an argument such as there are x number of Muslims and they eat three meals a day, therefore, the market size is $Y billions, is simply not applicable. The amount of halal they actually eat is a tiny fraction of that Y number.
As an indication of how small the market really is, even after the company was bought from us by Engro Foods of Pakistan, the company never grew past the point it had attained under our ownership. This is true even though the brand continues to be ubiquitous in the North American Muslim community as North America’s premier brand of Muslim foods. Ask any North American Muslim to name a brand of halal chicken nuggets, and the answer one always gets is Al Safa Halal.
