29/10/2025 (Oils and Fats International) - A new study has found that palm oil use in supermarket products is not as widespread as previously thought.

The ‘Does Palm Oil Really Rule The Supermarket?’ study, published on 24 October by IOP Publishing, tested widely cited claims that 50% of supermarket products contained palm oil.

It found that of the three supermarkets studied, only 8% of products list palm oil directly, with vegetable oil derivatives suggesting palm oil in up to 33% of items.

The study, led by Emily Meijaard of scientific consultancy Borneo Futures, analysed the ingredient lists of approximately 1,600 food products from three supermarkets (Albert Heijn, the Netherlands; Sainsbury’s, UK; and Woolworths, Australia) to evaluate the prevalence of palm and palm kernel oil, as well as other major vegetable oil crops.

Across the supermarkets, palm and/or palm kernel oil were explicitly listed in an estimated 7.9% of products, while maize (19%), rapeseed (15%) and soya (14%) were more prevalent.

Up to 40% of products at the supermarkets could also have contained palm oil through unspecified vegetable oils or oleochemicals, which were found in about 18% of all sampled products.

“This underscores a broader challenge: modern processed foods are part of complex global supply chains that rely on interchangeable commodities such as palm oil,” the study said.

“While traceability mechanisms like those promoted by the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) aim to enhance upstream accountability, consumer-facing labelling transparency remains inadequate.”

The researchers called for clearer food labelling and broader systems-level impact assessments for consumers to make fully informed choices to align with their values and goals.

“Consumers should have access to detailed product attributes, such as the percentage of palm oil sourced from Indonesia, Malaysia, or smallholder farms, the origin of peanuts in peanut butter, or the proportion of soya from regions like Mato Grosso versus São Paulo,” the study said.

The study concluded that, across the three major Western supermarkets, palm oil was present in up to 40% of products when oleochemicals and oils of uncertain provenance were included.

“For the three supermarkets we sampled, in 2024, we can conclude that palm oil, palm kernel oil and their derivatives are not present in 50% of listed products, packaged products, foodstuffs or packaged foodstuffs on offer online. Indeed, within food products, palm prevalence was on par with that of cacao,” the study said.

“We suspect the ‘50% claim’ is an outdated statistic, has always been wrong, applies to other world regions or supermarket chains, or was always impossible to verify because of the uncertainties around the crop origin of oleochemical and ‘unspecified oils’.”

The researchers said it remained unclear if oil palm use in supermarket products had genuinely declined since 2006 due to reformulation or if the original statistic had simply been inaccurate or without a credible scientific basis.

At the national level where the sampled supermarkets were located, domestic vegetable oil use data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicated a relative decline in palm oil consumption.

From 2006-2022 (the last year data was available), palm and palm kernel oil’s share of the domestic supply of vegetable oils included in the study dropped from 29% to 9% in Australia, from 38% to 16% in the UK, and from 50% to 20% in the Netherlands.

In the same period, at a global level, palm oil’s share of vegetable oil supply increased from 33% to 35%, potentially indicating a displacement of palm oil from the Global North to the Global South.

“With palm oil production increasing globally, and relative consumption shifting increasingly to countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, China and Malaysia, it is unlikely that any substitution of palm oil for other vegetable oils in the Global North has resulted in net environmental and social benefits,” the study said.

“Rather than achieving a meaningful reduction in environmental and social harm, any shift away from palm oil in Europe and Australia … redirects rather than resolves the underlying issues associated with oil palm expansion and production.”

https://www.ofimagazine.com/news/new-study-finds-palm-oil-not-in-50-of-supermarket-products