Can Plant-Based "Pork" Sell In Muslim South Asia?

As we've pointed out, Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population and India has the second largest.
Including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia and 11 million or so folks in the Philippines and you've got what the marketeer coyly refers to as "a large addressable market".
It's like the old joke about the two shoe sellers sent to Kenya in the early years of the last century:

1) "Terrible market, nobody wears shoes here".
2) "Wonderful market, nobody wears shoes here".

Ahem. From the South China Morning Post, January 10:

Impossible Pork: in Muslim Southeast Asia, an impossible sell?

• The company behind the Impossible Burger is hoping to gain halal certification for its new products Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage
• But in a region where four in 10 people are Muslim, even the name may be unpalatable

When Impossible Burgers launched in Singapore 10 months ago, they were a hit with many curious foodies who were surprised by how much like beef the plant-based products tasted.

But whether Impossible Foods, the company behind the burgers, will be on to another winner with its Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage is another matter entirely.

Encouraging Muslims to take a bite out of either of these products seems like something of a Mission Impossible in Southeast Asia, where experts say even the names could prove off-putting. More than four in 10 of the region’s population of 665 million practise Islam, in which consuming pork is haram or forbidden.

Impossible Foods estimates that about 2.5 billion people worldwide refrain from pork and pork-derived products based on the religious practices of Hindus, Jews, Muslims and some Christian sects.

The company’s senior flavour scientist Laura Kliman said everyone could enjoy Impossible Pork “without compromise to deliciousness, ethics or Earth”.

It’s as yet unclear whether the region’s Islamic authorities will clear the products as suitable for Muslim consumption. While the Impossible Burger received its kosher certification from the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America in May 2018, and its halal certification from the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America in December of the same year, neither of the new offerings have been certified in the US.

Pat Brown, the CEO of the company, which debuted the two new products in the United States this week, has said the products were not specifically designed to target people with religious objections, but that seeking kosher and halal certification was “important to us”. The two products are made entirely from plants and contain no animal hormones....MORE

If I was running strategy for one of these purveyors I'd have already started talks with Al-Azhar and gotten to know all the halal certifying bodies across the region.
And maybe registered that blockchain-based halal traceability startup I've always dreamed of.
"Here at GIGO Group, we believe..."*

*'Garbage in, garbage out', based on I. Kaminska's observation that if you don't get it right, at the very beginning of the chain, and at each step along the way, blockchain or not doesn't matter a whit. In other words, "Who's verifying the verifiers?"