IDENTIFICATION OF PALM OIL: THE DEFRA PROJECT
2012-2016
This refers to the two DEFRA projects that looked at the identification of palm oil and other types of vegetable oils in food oil mixtures and in food products which was funded by DEFRA, UK.
PROJECT DETAILS
The problem
What a delicious meat pie, a ready-to-heat beef and mushroom lasagne, or a crusty digestive biscuit have in common? If you look closely at the label, you will find a rather generic and a little bit mysterious ingredient: “vegetable oil”. Well, what is it? Olive oil? Sunflower oil? Cottonseed oil? Rapeseed, soybean, coconut or corn oil? It turns out the majority of this vegetable oil would be actually palm oil.
Palm oil? Palm oil comes from the mesocarp of the palm fruit and is produced using intensive agriculture – and sometimes non-sustainably - in tropical areas such as Indonesia, Malaysia (SE Asia) and also in Nigeria and Thailand. In fact, according to a recent study, 8 out of 10 products in a UK supermarket contain palm oil and that is not just food (although food in the great majority!). That is a lot of palm oil, millions of tonnes of it produced every year, which results in a lot of palm oil trees occupying forest space, a lot of workers working on difficult conditions to meet ever increasing global demand. So, palm oil is everywhere but yet it remains hidden in most of our everyday processed foods. Consumers might want to know if food products contain palm oil or not and preferably if it comes from sustainable sources. At the moment there are no manners from that, apart from the voluntary information supplied from some good food retailers out there. As all of these are about to change and under the new EU Food Information law, by 2015, all food labels will be more informative, regulators with as DEFRA would also need to know if food businesses comply with the new guidelines..
Decisions, decision, decisions …
The mission
Here is where we fit to the puzzle: we wanted to provide to food regulators, food businesses and researchers with an easy way to find the composition of a refined vegetable oil blend. Does my tested blend contain palm or not? Does it have rapeseed or sunflower oil? If yes, how much? We envisioned the tool as an easy to access web application that everybody can use.
The project
This initiative is based on a research project funded by the Department of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) entitled: “Evaluation of methodologies to verify vegetable oil species in mixtures of oil”(FAO 117) which ran from June 2012 to August 2013 at the Institute for Global Food Security of Queen’s University Belfast.