We’ve started to get weekly emails about our use of palm oil in our products – and rightly so. We WANT to be held accountable and we love that our noodlers are genuinely passionate about the environment.
Palm oil is everywhere; from lipsticks to biofuel; it’s also in our Kabuto Noodles ingredients list.
What sort of palm oil do we use?
Palm oil can be sustainable or not sustainable. We only use certified sustainable palm oil.
Why do you use it?
We use palm oil to fry our onions in, so literally seasoning for the seasoning. Palm oil is odourless and has a neutral taste so frying anything in palm oil will only bring out the ingredients natural flavours. If you’ve ever had the delight of enjoying our noodle pots you’ll know that some of our flavours have little pieces of onion in; everyone’s second favourite Allium*.
These onions are all fried up; in palm oil, before being distributed into our seasoning. It is a tiny amount of palm oil in each pot. Because we use such a small volume of palm oil, we don’t have a huge amount of purchasing power to change what our supplier is using but we do ensure whatever they are using is certified sustainable.
Okay, so it’s only a small amount can’t you use something else?
The subject of palm oil is TRICKY. It’s confusing, it’s emotional and ‘rightly’ shows us the truth of burning forests; which is HORRIBLE. Unsustainable palm oil farming leads to deforestation and human right abuse; farmers need to be able to make a living but a living that also generates an ethical product.
Fortunately, the RSPO exists, the Round Table of Sustainable Palm Oil. Sustainable palm oil farms have to behave ethically and transparently to protect and conserve ecosystems amongst other strict regulations. And this is where we make sure our oil adheres to the guidelines which the RSPO set out.
Greenpeace is pressuring companies to ‘Clean up their act’ and ditching dirty palm oil ASAP. Encouraging brands to ‘investigate their palm oil suppliers and only buy from responsible growers that aren’t destroying forests or exploiting local people.’ We'll make sure we continue to make sure we source our palm oil from reputable suppliers, always.
Why don’t you have the sustainable palm oil logo on your packaging then?
It’s a good and fair question. We’d like to if we could, but our packaging is so small it’s pretty tricky to get everything on there already! If we ever make anything larger that also contains sustainable palm oil we will be sure to include it.
So what really is the problem with palm oil?
That’s the problem, there’s a lot of uncertainty over palm oil and what is the right or wrong way to go about it. Our stance is to keep only using certified sustainable palm oil and keep tabs on what we feel and know is the right thing to do when sourcing our ingredients. We will be continuing to fry our onion, sustainably, but also support turning the heat up on farmers to continue to deliver a better, certified sustainable product.
