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Palm oil helps to provide solutions, particularly in the food manufacturing industry in many countries. This is true, especially in the fat based food manufacturing sector where food formulators are often faced with many challenges in the forms of formulations and functionality. The correct ingredients are needed to improve food product quality and also to provide functionality.

Today, palm oil is playing a huge role in closing some of these gaps by providing viable solutions to the food manufacturing industry globally.

How does palm oil play these role?

Palm oil is different from other fat/oil commodities since it has balanced fatty acid profile with saturated fatty acids almost equalling the unsaturated fatty acids. Due to this, palm oil takes on a natural semi solid form (about 20% solid fat) at room temperature.

This allows palm oil to be readily fractionated with various fractions differing in their solid fat content conferring different melting characteristics well suited for various types of functionality in different fat based food formulations. Today, the palm oil industry offers an alternative affordable and natural solid fats to the global margarine industry which has been relying heavily on partially hydrogenated fats.

Similarly, the processed meat industry can now formulate and produced Halal processed meat products utilizing natural palm fats for sausages, bologna and other types of processed meat. Besides those, the infant formula industry also relies on palm oil to provide a natural source of palmitic acid required in their infant formulas. There many more good examples besides the above and without doubt, palm oil would be a good choice for many food manufacturers due to its ease of availability and cost effectiveness.