Bad fame persecutes palm oil, a more or less common ingredient in the industry due to its price, since it is less healthy than olive oil or sunflower oil. The latter, more neutral, has thus become in recent years a great protagonist of many of the sweetsbuns or cookies that we find in the supermarket.
Cheaper, ‘healthier’ and less flavorful than olive oil, sunflower oil has become a essential resource in the industry. So much so that the sunflower oil content is often advertised on the packaging.
However, the fine print on batch and labeling More and more products of this style put warnings like “Sunflower Oil Substituted for Palm” or “Invalid Sunflower Claims.”
This, neither more nor less, is due to a law that approves the relabeling of products affected by the lack of raw materials from Ukraine, which entered into force in April 2022right at the outbreak of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
That meant the impossibility of acquiring certain raw materials such as sunflower oil, on which Spain is highly dependent. Faced with this situation, the Government decided allow that relabeling which, even today, is allowed.
To find out which products, theoretically made with sunflower oil, are made with palm oil, we must look at the batch of the product in question. There, where the expiration or best-before date also usually appears, is where the brand should warn of the substitution.
The more or less obvious reason is that the brands They didn’t have as much room for maneuver. how to change the packaging of this type of products from one day to the next, since the volume that they usually handle for packaging is very high and the situation caught them just as unawares as the others.
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The truth is that it is a temporary situation that the law contemplates, but that requires the consumer to look more than necessary On the packaging, we can find products that are advertised as “made with sunflower oil” and then we are surprised on the label that they are made with palm oil.
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