Approche fonctionnelle de l’emploi de l’huile de palme – Perspectives d’évolution réglementaire en matière d’étiquetage

Formulating food products requires taking into account the functional characteristics of the ingredients as well as nutrition facts and recommendations, quality of the end-product, supplying and production, regulatory compliance… For food recipes where fats do play an important texturing function (based on their crystallisation properties), the selection of adequate oils or fats may become rather complex with emerging additional requirements, like finding alternatives to palm oil – the oil that became itself an efficient substitute to partially hydrogenated fats when the trans fatty acids issue occurred in the nineties. Looking for optimised formulations should first and foremost focus on nutritional facts (reduction of saturated fatty acids – SAFA, reduction of fat contents when relevant) and functionality. As far as palm oil respond to the required specifications, too systematic attempts for avoiding it, may lead to less satisfactory options in terms of nutrition or quality result.The main existing options are described and related to the dependence of the formulations to the ‘‘solid function’’ of fats : when possible, the changes have already or will be done (frying oils, certain applications in bakery fats…) ; in some cases (namely puff pastry), reduction of SAFA or fat content is much more critical.The paper ends on regulatory aspects of food labelling as far as the ingredients specific origin and the nutrition facts will have to be mentioned by the end of 2016.