THE GUARDIAN: Retailers and restaurants cash in on rapidly expanding and highly profitable market in halal food and drinks
Few things define the traditional good life in France better than champagne and foie gras, but few would have thought them symbols of social integration – until now.
A boom in sales of halal products, including alcohol-free bubbly and goose liver paté approved by Islamic law, is being driven by the emergence of an affluent middle class of young Muslims.
Known as the bourgeois – a play on bourgeois and the word beur, slang for a French person of North African descent – these new consumers are behind a rapidly expanding and highly profitable market in halal food and drinks.
With spending power worth an estimated €5.5bn a year, according to the opinion pollsters Solis, these under-40s are forcing international food suppliers to cater for their demands.
Yanis Bouarbi, 33, an IT specialist who started the website paris-hallal.com, which lists restaurants in France serving halal food, says young Muslims are at the heart of a mini social revolution.
"When our parents and grandparents came to France they did mostly manual work and the priority was having enough to feed the family," said Bouarbi, who arrived from Algeria at the age of three.
"But second or third-generation people like me have studied, have good jobs and money and want to go out and profit from French culture without compromising our religious beliefs. We don't just want cheap kebabs, we want Japanese, Thai, French food; we want to be like the rest of you."
The demand for halal products, currently increasing by an estimated 15% a year, has captured the attention of food giants such as the supermarket group Casino, which has stocked an increasing variety of halal foods – mostly meat products – for the last three years. >>> Kim Willsher in Paris | Easter Monday, April 05, 2010
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