DAR

What You Should Know

Darling Ingredients Inc. is the largest publicly-traded global leader in the rendering and recovery of animal byproducts and food-waste, organized into reporting segments spanning Feed Ingredients (the largest segment — rendering of animal byproducts from beef, pork, and poultry slaughter-and-processing operations into animal-feed-grade tallow, lard, meat-and-bone-meal, and other feed-ingredient products sold globally to the animal-nutrition industry), Food Ingredients (food-grade collagen-and-gelatin products through Rousselot — one of the largest global producers of food-grade gelatin and collagen-peptide products sourced from porcine, bovine, and poultry-derived raw materials — and food-grade fats and proteins through Sonac and CTH), and Fuel Ingredients (the Diamond Green Diesel joint venture with Valero Energy — the largest renewable-diesel producer in North America, with substantial production capacity at facilities in Norco, Louisiana and Port Arthur, Texas, plus a sustainable-aviation-fuel project at Port Arthur). Renewable-diesel and sustainable-aviation-fuel production, food-waste recycling, and the bovine-and-poultry-derived rendering and food-ingredient activities are unambiguously permissible at the activity level under standard Sharia methodology — these are general-purpose commodity-processing and biofuel-production activities. The Sharia concern is the porcine-byproduct exposure: Darling Ingredients processes substantial volumes of pork-derived raw materials in its feed-ingredients and food-ingredients operations (porcine fat, porcine collagen and gelatin through Rousselot), and porcine-derived products are explicitly prohibited under Islamic law. Most major Sharia advisory boards classify Darling Ingredients as doubtful or non-compliant on the porcine-revenue grounds — the porcine-byproduct share of revenue may exceed the 5% haram-revenue Sharia threshold depending on the period and methodology. Investors evaluating Darling Ingredients should look through to the porcine-revenue share at their preferred screening platform.