Grocery and meat
Is Midamar halal?
Midamar is an ISA-certified halal brand from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that pleaded guilty in 2015 to federal fraud over mislabeled export beef and served USDA-supervised probation.
The longer answer
Midamar, established in 1974 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, posts a '2022 ISA Midamar Halal Verification letter' from Islamic Services of America on its site and states it 'works with several different certifying bodies' for domestic and export sales; ISA, also in Cedar Rapids, lists Midamar as a client. In October 2014 a federal indictment was unsealed against founder William B. Aossey Jr., and in December 2014 Midamar, ISA and Aossey's sons were charged in a 92-count indictment over beef from a plant not approved for export to Malaysia and Indonesia whose USDA establishment numbers were removed and relabeled, filling about $5 million in halal orders. Aossey Jr. was convicted on 15 of 19 counts in July 2015 and sentenced to two years in prison; Midamar and ISA each pleaded guilty to one fraud count in September 2015 and on February 25, 2016 received five years' probation, fines ($20,000 and $60,000) and a shared $600,000 forfeiture under a USDA consent decree with five years of oversight. The case concerned export labeling, not whether the meat was slaughtered halal; Midamar remains in business.
What to check before you order
Look for the ISA mark; the five-year USDA oversight from the 2016 sentence has lapsed, so rely on the current certificate rather than the case history.
How we decide
We only report what the company or its certifier has said publicly, and we link to it below. We do not test food, and we do not take a brand’s word from a single franchise. If a location tells you something different from this page, trust the location and tell us.