Palm oil: Balancing functionality and social responsibility with consumer concerns

17 Sep 2019 --- The Amazon fires have pushed the issue of deforestation back into the global spotlight and reiterated questions on the food industry’s role in the situation. Large swathes of land, including tropical rainforests, are cleared for agricultural crops, such as palm oil plantations, leading to a loss of biodiversity and habitat for animals and wildlife. This reality brings a focus on how involved companies are collaborating on the journey towards sustainable palm oil, as its functionality continues to prove its stalwart, yet controversial, status.

Despite often being positioned as a polarizing ingredient, the food industry generally considers palm oil to be the best and most sustainable edible vegetable oil. It is consumed daily by billions across multiple food items including margarine, chocolate, cookies, confectionery, bread, instant noodles and much more. 

Indeed, it is the most efficient oil crop, using three to seven times less land and producing five times more oil per hectare compared to other oil crops such as rapeseed, sunflower, coconut and soy. Also, palm oil producers, governments, and farming communities rely upon palm for its high yields and financial returns. 

However, in the wake of fire damage in the Amazon, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is stressing how seriously it takes the issue – whether fire is intentionally set for land clearing or accidental. The RSPO, of course, prohibits the use of fire under its standard and has been actively monitoring, with satellite technology, all detected fire hotspots within both RSPO certified and non-certified concessions in Malaysia and Indonesia, other key growing regions for palm oil production. 

Sustainable supply chain 
Unsustainable palm oil production methods are increasingly being shunned by key industry players aware of the associated reputational-risks. Instead, a growing movement towards creating a viable 100 percent sustainable palm oil supply chain is a work in progress, hence the existence and continuing work of the RSPO and many other pro-sustainable palm oil organizations and initiatives. 

Despite the progression, other NPD shuns palm oil altogether. Statistics from Innova Market Insights report a strong rise in products claiming to be “palm oil free,” with 73 percent CAGR reported from 2015 to 2017. Top global market categories with a palm oil free claim, as a percentage of new food and beverage launches in 2017, are bakery (55 percent), spreads (7 percent), cereals (5 percent), ready meals & sides dishes (4 percent) and baby/toddler food (3 percent).

One company making waves in sustainable palm oil is Vandemoortele. When talking about sustainability, the company stresses that it’s not only about the environment but also about social concern. Since last January, Vandemoortele has been supporting a landscape program in Indonesia run by the Earthworm Foundation as part of its zero-deforestation objective. The Earthworm Foundation, formerly known as The Forest Trust (TFT), is a non-profit organization driven by the desire to positively impact the relationship between people and nature. It works towards a palm oil cycle that respects both people and the planet and advises Vandemoortele on its corporate palm oil policy and strategy.

Speaking with FoodIngredientsFirst, Aurelie Comhaire, Group Sustainability Manager at Vandemoortele explains how palm oil has unique functional properties providing the right structure, freshness, and taste for high-quality food products backed up by the fact that palm oil has a nutritionally balanced composition, having between 20 percent and 40 percent less saturated fat compared to milk fat and coconut oil respectively.

“We are convinced that when produced sustainably, palm oil is a suitable oil for use in the food industry,” Comhaire stresses. “We made significant progress in 2018. We reached 98.5 percent traceability to mill level for all the palm oil we bought and we published online traceability lists of the mill in our palm oil supply chains. One hundred percent of our purchased palm oil volumes are covered by suppliers committed to a NDPE (no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation) policy and we continue to engage with our suppliers and Earthworm Foundation to work towards transformation in the supply chain.”

Mapping the palm oil supply chain 
It is important for companies to work with suppliers who have thoroughly mapped their palm oil supply chains. This is vital for identifying high-risk sources and for helping ensure palm oil is produced sustainably, according to Monique van Wijnbergen, Sustainability Director of Natural Habitats Group. 

“Companies should investigate and map their supply chain from the ingredients they source to the palm oil grower, and transition their current anonymous sourcing, or mass balance sourcing model, to an identity-preserved model in which palm oil from a single identifiable certified source is kept separately from unsustainable palm oil,” she says. 

This summer, the European Palm Oil Alliance (EPOA) joined forces with other industry associations, stakeholder companies, and civil society bodies, to urge all European stakeholders to get behind the Sustainable Palm Oil Choice (SPOC) initiative.

Europe’s food manufacturers and retailers need to choose certified sustainable palm oil instead of backing messages to drop palm oil altogether, the organization asserts. The aim is to drive the uptake of certified sustainable palm oil (CSPO) across Europe’s food manufacturing value chain and the objective is for all manufacturers and retailers to choose and use only CSPO in their production and to achieve the target of 100 percent CSPO in European food manufacturing by 2020.

“We have to empower companies, retailers and consumers to choose sustainable palm oil. I believe we will achieve this by telling honest stories about the impact of sustainable production on the ground,” says Frans Claassen, EPOA’s Chair.

“As a part of this initiative, EPOA has launched a campaign platform that will showcase explanatory videos, participants’ testimonials, examples and best practices. These stories explain why people believe in CSPO and allows companies and NGOs to speak up. The platform will also include a progress reporting tool in the shape of an interactive map of Europe with the latest monitoring data for individual countries as well as showing progress in palm-oil producing countries.”

Manufacturers, NGOs and producers are being particularly targeted, as they have a key role to play as catalysts helping to drive change within their respective spheres.

Meanwhile, back in Indonesia and Malaysia, the seasonal patterns there are causing an increase in hotspots and forest fires, resulting in haze and other negative environmental impacts that much of the region are currently experiencing, according to the RSPO. 

“RSPO’s Geographic Information System (GIS) Manager and Investigation and Monitoring Unit (IMU) are following the situation closely,” a statement reads. “As of September 10, we detected a total of 244 hotspots within RSPO member concessions from a total of 48,4222 hotspots across Malaysia and Indonesia. This means that hotspots in RSPO concessions represent approximately 0.50 percent of all hotspots detected. However, this is still too many in our opinion.”

The IMU is actively following up with each member where a hotspot has been detected, to verify whether there is an occurrence of fire (and if so, what efforts are being made to extinguish the fire) or not. 

“In our commitment to transparency and accountability, our interactive map application GeoRSPO is publicly available and displays relevant data relating to members’ concessions and land cover, including any active hotspots. We remain committed to our strengthened principles and criteria relating to fire prevention and a complete ban of the use of fire within RSPO certified units. We applaud our members for committing to these most stringent standards and encourage them to continue to monitor their concessions,” the RSPO concludes. 

What’s next?
The buzz around palm oil is not likely to calm down any time soon and the expectations are that it will remain a controversial subject, particularly from a consumer perspective. However, the RSPO and other initiatives will continue to get more players across industry to sign up to sustainable supply chain commitments and we will have to wait to discover precisely what progress will be made towards a 100 percent “clean” global supply chain. 

In the meantime, as palm oil is the most productive vegetable oil crop on the planet, manufacturers will also continue to be mindful of its negative associations and do all they can to contribute to its sustainability. 

By Gaynor Selby