Purpose The incredulity among Muslim consumers due to fake and doubtful halal logos has led to some querying the halal compliance and halal integrity among food small and medium enterprises (SMEs). By using the traceability systems consumers may track and trace the movement of food products available in the market. The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that influence food SMEs’ intention to adopt a halal traceability system. Design/methodology/approach A structured questionnaire survey was developed and administered to a systematic random sampling of 260 food SMEs. The data were analyzed using descriptive analysis, Chi-square analysis, Pearson correlation analysis and logistic regression analysis. Findings The results revealed a strong correlation between the environmental aspect (EA) and perceived usefulness (PU) of a halal traceability system. Sales turnover, PU, perceived ease of use, technological aspect, organizational aspect and EA are the factors that influenced food SMEs’ intention to adopt a halal traceability system. Research limitations/implications The context of this study is confined to the SMEs in the food industry in Peninsular Malaysia, thereby limiting the generalizability of the findings to other industries. Practical implications This study shows a halal traceability system facilitates food SMEs in enhancing their business and provides tremendous potential to further improve the halal industry in Malaysia. Originality/value The traceability system that is perceived to be easy and useful are the most influential factors toward the adoption of technology among food SMEs. Thus, this study confirms the growing importance of the halal traceability system in the food industry.

Traceability system enables agro-food small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to record the information on attributes of their products along the food supply chain effectively. The halal status of the food products can be retained across companies’ supply chain by practising halal traceability system. This system is considered as one of the advanced technologies to overcome the violation of halal food products in the market despite low usage of advanced technologies detected among Malaysian SMEs. The main objective of the study was to investigate the agro-food SMEs’ intention to adopt halal traceability system. This study involved 130 agro-food SMEs that were selected using a systematic random sampling method. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data from the SMEs. The data were analyzed using descriptive analysis, mean ranking analysis, Chisquare analysis, and independent-samples t-test. The results revealed that majority of agro -food SMEs involved in this study (111 companies, 85.4%) were categorized as small business size companies and most of the agro-food SMEs (73 companies, 56.2%) was in operation for less and equal to 9 years in the agro-food industry. Based on the mean ranking analysis, the agro-food SMEs have high intention to adopt halal traceability system (mean score of 4.25). From the Chi-square analysis result, there was a significant association between sales turnover and agro-food SMEs’ intention to adopt halal traceability system (p=0.046). This explained that the agro-food SMEs with low sales turnover tend to have high intention to adopt halal traceability system in order to upgrade their businesses. Independent-samples t-test revealed that there was a significant difference between sales turnover of low and high intention of agro-food SMEs to adopt halal traceability system; t(128) = 1.964, p = 0.052. This study concluded that the agrofood SMEs should be encouraged and exposed to the adoption of advanced technologies in the market.