Producing non-palm margarines with success Margarine manufacturers wanting to introduce non-palm products need to do much more than simply swap lipid ingredients. Solving the challenges takes a systematic and holistic approach to everything from sourcing alternative oils and emulsifiers to coping with higher melting points. By Anders Mølbak Jensen, Global Product & Application Manager, Lipid & Fine Foods Palsgaard A/S. When it’s properly cultivated, palm oil is the most sustainable, best-functioning vegetable oil on the planet. It uses far less land per tonne of product than, for example, the soy bean oil from which lecithin is won. Traditional palm oil production, however, has been shown to have far-reaching consequences for the environment and for local communities. From massive deforestation to abusive working conditions, many oil palm plantations have become a severe problem. Wildlife, too, is impacted by unsus- tainable plantage practices, with orangatuan numbers now vastly reduced in Borneo, Indonesia, one of the world’s primary sources of palm oil raw materials. Correspondingly, consumers – among them the more environmentally conscious Millennial generation – have become increasingly aware of palm oil as a potential liability in their shopping carts. And the resulting pressure in countries such as France, the UK, Norway, Sweden and Germany, in particular, has seen many margarine manufacturers looking for alternatives to palm. Today, viable alternatives have emerged in the marketplace, even for more challenging recipes. Not so simple No one said going non-palm was going to be easy. Converting margarine recipes, for example, from using palm-based oils and palmbased emulsifiers to non-palm equivalents isn’t an overnight switch. Let’s start with the emulsifiers – a small part of the recipe but an extremely important one. If you remove palm oil as a raw material for emulsifiers, you need to replace it 1
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