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By Halaltravelpal | February 09,2026 Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Solo Indonesia A Gift of Faith Culture and Community Indonesia has
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By Halal Travel Pal Editorial Team · 20 May 2026
Rohaizad Hassan, General Manager of Food Safety and Defense at Yıldız Holding, Istanbul.
General Manager, Food Safety and Defense, Yıldız Holding
32 years in halal industry, aviation catering and global food governance
Based in Istanbul, Türkiye
There is a version of the halal industry story that most people know.
Meet Rohaizad Hassan, who has spent 32 years working on the version most people don’t see. The one that happens inside boardrooms in Frankfurt, Istanbul, and Kuala Lumpur. The one involving supply chains that cross a dozen regulatory jurisdictions before a single biscuit reaches a shelf. The one where halal isn’t a label applied at the end of a process but a principle embedded into the architecture of how global food companies operate.
For halal travellers and families, Willowbrook offers something truly unique. You can camp under the stars, enjoy scenic walking trails, or just relax while your children meet the animals and play in the open air. There is a small cafe and farm shop where you can enjoy fresh halal produce, free range eggs, and honest, home cooked food.
At 54, he is one of the most quietly influential figures in halal compliance worldwide, and he’s only just getting started.
Rohaizad began his career in Malaysia, which at the time was establishing itself as the global reference point for halal industry development. He joined the Halal Industry Development Corporation, the Malaysian government’s lead agency for halal growth, where he led a data warehouse project tracking halal export and investment data that the Ministry of Trade and Industry still relies on today. His team won the Prime Minister’s Special Award in 2014 for the best government project outcomes aligned with national interests.
But even in those early years, his thinking was already reaching beyond borders. He co-authored the Halal Guidebook for Producers, a publication that was selected among Malaysia’s 50 best titles for international rights at the Frankfurt International Book Fair. It was an early signal that his approach to halal was never going to be locally contained.
He also founded Halal Industry Quest, a free-access knowledge platform at halalindustryquest.com that brings together content from halal industry experts across Malaysia. It was a pro-bono effort, built on the belief that halal knowledge shouldn’t sit behind paywalls or inside institutions. That instinct, to make expertise accessible rather than gatekeep it, runs through everything he’s built since.
The chapter of his career that perhaps best illustrates his reach came when he joined Lufthansa Service Holding AG in Frankfurt, where he became the inaugural Director of Halal at LSG Group, at the time one of the world’s largest inflight catering companies. He was, in other words, the first person to hold this role in the organisation’s history.
What that meant in practice was building a global halal standard from the ground up and then making it work across an industry that doesn’t slow down for anyone. He strengthened halal compliance across Europe and the Americas for airline customers including Emirates, Etihad, and Turkish Airlines. He supported inaugural halal operations in Panama, San Francisco, Boston, and Luanda. He helped design a halal facility for LSG’s Chicago service centre.
For Muslim travellers, the halal meal on a long-haul flight can feel like a small thing. Behind it is an enormous amount of careful unseen work. Rohaizad did that work, and he did it at scale.
Today, Rohaizad serves as General Manager of Food Safety and Defense at Yıldız Holding in Istanbul, one of the world’s largest food and retail groups. Through its global snacking company pladis, the organisation brings together brands with centuries of heritage between them: Godiva, founded in Belgium in 1926, McVitie’s, a British institution since 1830, and Ülker, established in Türkiye in 1944.
In this role, his mandate is broader than halal alone. He leads enterprise-wide programmes covering consumer food sensitivity compliance across halal, kosher, vegetarian, vegan, and plant-based standards, alongside food safety governance and food defense. He sits on the Group’s Food Safety Board Presidency, the corporate authority responsible for overseeing compliance across production sites and commercial offices worldwide. Since 2021, he has completed more than 140 consultations on halal compliance challenges within the group’s global network.
It is, by any measure, a serious remit.
When you’ve spent three decades watching an industry from the inside, you develop views. Rohaizad’s are direct.
He believes the halal industry’s reliance on certification as its primary mechanism of assurance is no longer sufficient for the world it operates in. The future, in his view, lies in embedding halal into enterprise food safety systems as a governance framework, rather than treating it as an external stamp applied at the end of a process. Technology, from blockchain to AI-enabled traceability, has a role to play, but only when paired with genuine institutional commitment.
He is also candid about fragmentation. The divergence between halal standards across different jurisdictions creates real trade barriers and genuine confusion for consumers and producers alike. His position is clear: shared production environments should have explicit, consistent rules about what is and isn’t permissible, not interpretations that vary depending on where you happen to be certified.
And he holds a broader ambition for the industry that goes beyond compliance. He believes the global halal ecosystem should be moving toward regional production centres for key ingredients and pharmaceuticals, built through strategic collaboration with Muslim-majority countries. The goal is reducing long-term import dependence and creating genuine food security. It’s a vision that is economic, strategic, and, at its core, deeply principled.
At Halal Travel Pal, we believe that understanding the world you travel into makes you a better traveller. The halal food on your plate in a hotel restaurant, on your flight, or in the market you wander through on a Friday afternoon exists because of a long chain of decisions, standards, and people who cared enough to get it right.
Rohaizad Hassan is one of those people. We are honoured to introduce him as the first feature in our HTP Leadership Series, a space where we bring the voices shaping the halal world closer to the community of travellers and conscious consumers who benefit from their work.
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