Aliyah Rizq Holdings Pte Ltd: Singapore Prestige Class Award Top 20 Winners & Singapore Consumer Choice Award Top 20 Winners 2022/2023

Aliyah Rizq Holdings manages multiple farms around the globe, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and soon to expend into UK. The company was founded in 2016 by Mr Ashraf Bakar who has been in the farming industry for over 12 years.

The main difference between Aliyah Rizq and other farms is that farms usually takes care of their own animals, sales and market rates. Mr Ashraf, on the other hand, takes the effort to help those less fortunate farmers and became their off-takers. He supplies animals to these farmers for them to continue breeding and grow their farm. Not only is he helping them improve their business, he is also uniting the community. Mr Ashraf also takes initiative to provide training and education for them, sending vets to these farmers to educate them on the possible risks and ways to improve. Mr Ashraf also works with schools in Indonesia and Malaysia, University of Sumatra Utara, Institute of Penelitian Bogor, Institute of Veterinary Malaysia and University of Technology Malaysia just to name a few. He offers student attachment programs where they will get to have hands-on experience in his farms. Upon graduation, many of the students choose to join Mr Ashraf’s company as either admin staff, vets or animal nutritionist.

In the next 5-10 years, Mr Ashraf is planning to expend his company to all the continents. After UK, he plans to continue in Africa and Middle-East followed by China being the last stop as he is seeing a trend of increasing demands for mutton meat even among the non-Muslim community. Currently, the company has more than 50 people in the team right now, with Country Directors in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the UK. Mr Ashraf has implemented several measures to ensure his staffs are doing their best. Underperforming staffs will be put on a 3-month probation period, if their performance is still not up to standard by the end of probation, they will be shifted into a different role/department. If they were to underperform again, they will unfortunately be let off.

For Mr Ashraf, running a global team with different

quality of manpower in each country is definitely not easy to maintain. Training them is not the difficult part, but it all boils down to the individual’s attitude, passion, and the willingness to learn. For example, the manure has to be taken out everyday, but some workers may be lazy and only do it once every 2-3 days, causing the ammonia build-up which may cause the animals to fall sick. Even small routine has a significance, but it has to taken seriously before the domino effect occurs.

Mr Ashraf is currently in the midst of developing an app for B2C. In the app, there will be B2B and B2G function as well. Within the app, customers will be able to retain the their personal data and Aliyah Rizq won’t have access to it, it will be kept safe in a blockchain. The app will be able to track all the animals that are being sent, slaughtered, processed, shipped, etc, customers will also be able to see and track each step of the progress with photos included. The system can detect these anomalies among the animals and match to the corresponding customers who will then be sent an automated system generated SMS. The queue system function in the app will send notification to customers “Your animal is the next to be slaughtered”. This greatly minimizes work on the admin and back-end side. A prototype app will be up around Sept and is set to launch by the end of 2022. Mr Ashraf also plans to implement more automation in the farm as well by putting in more machines to help the farmers. Currently the farm has a harvester to cut the grass, a chopper to cut it into finer pieces and send to the drum storage and a forklift operator to send it to the animal’s feeding bay. It’s very reliant on the manual-labor now hence the need for automation.

A lot of farmers are quitting this industry and encouraging their kids to pursue higher education instead of doing farming, hence their children do not know how to take over the business. For the older farmers, once they see that their children are financially capable, they will sell the farms and retire. There’s also food shortage due to the increasing global demand and decreasing supply. There are also rigid rules in terms of meeting food safety standard, a lot of labor is required to only obtain a certain output. Mr Ashraf has since came up with a solution. He matches an retiring farmer with a graduating-student in a mentor-mentee arrangement. The farmer will teach the students how to do the farming, and Mr Ashraf will personally teach him the business side of things. It will eventually develop into a shared-partnership business between the old farmers’ kids and the student/businessmen who takes over. Mr Ashraf will take on the role of an auditor to make this arrangement happen.

Mr Ashraf’s proudest & biggest achievements are Malaysian Book of Record for the number of animals slaughtered in 2019 (264 in one hour) and Indonesia Book of Record for the number of animals slaughtered in 2022 (4000 animals in one day). These media coverage helps to boost the reputation of his company. He is aiming to break the Guinness World Record next year.

In order to do our part for the global food shortage, we should pay more attention to farming, as that’s where majority of the global food supply lie. It is a very delicate ecosystem, so if there’s an imbalance in one aspect, it will affect everything else in the chain. The farmers can only do so much by themselves without proper businessmen helping them. However, consumers and governing bodies also play a big role in the whole ecosystem as well. As a consumer, you should buy and consume responsibly. If you want to bring it to the next level, you could donate your excess food to the needy, and by doing so the farmers get paid, you feel good about your charitable actions, and those that are in need gets help.

Farmers are also doing their best to minimize wastage, sheep skins can be upcycled into products such as leather good, meat into food, horns and tails into soup, bones can be turned into cement, and the manure can be turned into compost. Mr Ashraf is a big advocate for “no food waste”, whenever he has excess foods, he will share it with the smaller farmers around the area as his way of giving back to the community. He will also help to collect the parts of animals or manure that these farmers do not want or know how to utilize and in exchange, he will offer them vegetables.

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