Faced with a shortage of sunflower oil, producers want to change the composition of their products without changing the packaging, reports the French television BFM.
The list of foods containing sunflower oil is long – chips, canned fish, baby food, pastries, biscuits, ready meals. However, this ingredient may soon become rare due to the war in Ukraine. The country provides 50 percent of world exports of sunflower and oil, BTA reported.
Ukraine is one of the largest producers in the world, with 7 million tons of sunflower oil a year, of which 6.7 million are exported, according to AFP. And according to Fediol, the European Federation of Vegetable Oil Producers, regular monthly deliveries of 200,000 tonnes of sunflower oil to European ports were suspended in early March, Novethic reported. And while supplies are expected to be secured in the coming weeks, new uncertainties are looming – the war is making it difficult to sow sunflowers. The areas intended for this crop may be halved, and hence the harvest will be just as small. The question remains how to extract the extraction after a large part of the infrastructure has been destroyed.
To avoid the paralysis of production lines, food companies are already planning to reduce or eliminate sunflower oil in some products. Rapeseed oil and palm oil are in the top three for the food industry, along with sunflower oil. They can be used as substitutes – along with coconut oil, but to a lesser extent. However, such a transition, albeit temporary, requires research and costly technical adjustments in enterprises. Changing the oil requires a different cooking temperature, changes the consistency of the product, but most of all – can change its taste.
But apart from the taste, there is also the question of informing the consumer. Some customers do not want to buy foods that contain palm oil or avoid other oil substitutes because of allergies. In the perspective of a lack of sunflower oil, changes in ingredients will be needed quickly. However, it is not possible to replace the packaging at the last minute to update the contents of the products. It is also not possible to manually place stickers with the new contents on each package. In addition, the packaging market is also under pressure. Producers in the UK and France are already negotiating with the relevant departments on how to quickly change the labels of products in which sunflower oil has been replaced by another.
