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Abstract Background The term halal has been associated with Islam in various areas including services, foods, and product. One of the main focus of halal research is halal certification and standard. The certification process involves verification of halal authenticity of the foods and adherence to Islamic principles. Despite the growing issuance of halal accreditation and efforts in uniting of halal certification, there are significant differences in determining the standard of halal accreditation and halal food regulation particularly between Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and Malaysia, regardless of being neighbouring nations. Such instance is the variability of standards in determining the content of ethanol in the foods products. Thus, this review endeavours to study the standards in determining the permissible content of ethanol products and to investigate the reasons behind the contradiction in halal food regulation. Scope and approach The review is conducted through the literature regarding the dissimilarities of ethanol permissibility in halal dietary standard between the four countries, and at the same time, in-depth interviews with the corresponding from halal authorities in each country were also carried out. Key findings and conclusions Findings from the analysis suggest that authorities in those four countries differ their judgement based on these four factors; the material of preference for ethanol content; the technique of preference in ethanol detection laboratory; the undetermined constant in Blood Alcoholic Concentration calculation; and Islamic worldview on the usage of Alcohol. This review will be able to provide clarification and future references in constructing universal halal standard of ethanol content in the dietary product. Highlights • There are dissimilarities in the practice of ethanol standard in the halal dietary product, between Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. • The dissimilarities of standards are small, but in industrial scale will burden the halal producer to comply with these neighbouring nations certification law. • It is found that these dissimilarities revolved around four factors, which are material of preference, detection technique, BAC Limit, and Islamic Worldviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]