The new national standard of edible oil-“National Food Safety Standard Vegetable Oil” has been put into effect since December 21, 2018. This national standards is called for a long time to issue with epoch-making significance. It will end the industry chaos of unclear raw material ratio and sub-optimal, promote the establishment of a transparent and standardized consumption environment and market order, and lead the industry to high-quality development.
The new national standard for edible oil has been brewing for many years. This time, it is integrated and revised on the basis of the original four standards. The most important change is to increase the requirement that the label of edible vegetable blended oil should indicate the proportion of various edible vegetable oils, and to encourage the labeling of products containing more than 2% fatty acids. For this additional requirement, industry experts expressed high affirmation.
Why does the new national standard explicitly require the proportion of public formula of edible vegetable blending oil?
Blended oil is a kind of edible oil which is made up of two or more refined oils and scientifically blended in a certain proportion. Compared with corn oil, soybean oil, peanut oil and other single vegetable oils, blended oil contains more abundant and diverse micro-nutrients, and fatty acid balance has advantages. With the diversification of consumers'demand for nutrition and flavor in recent years, blended oil is more and more popular, with annual sales of millions of tons.
Although blended oils’ nutrition has more advantages and more and more demand, consumers have a long-standing blind spot of knowledge - the old national standard has no mandatory requirement for the proportion of blended oil formula and nutritional components to be clear and open, and unhealthy phenomena such as random blending, confused labeling, sub-filling and confusing concepts are flooding the market. "label what kind of oil is expensive, blend what kind of oil is cheaper and which kind of oil is more suitable" has become the industry's latent rule, and the real formula proportion has become the "top secret". According to the investigation, most of the disputes and complaints resulted from the failure of the manufacturer, and consumers'voice of "prescription publicity" is increasing.
Industry chaos has long attracted the attention of relevant departments of the country. According to the data, the revision and formulation of industry standards was initiated at the end of 2004. In the draft for comments at the end of 2013, it was proposed that the label of blended oil products should indicate the proportion of various edible vegetable oils. However, the new standard has not been issued, largely because of the lack of effective and accurate detection methods in the later period.
In this process, the central enterprises such as China Grain Storage and China Grain have taken an important step, taking the initiative to publicly blended oil formula. At the end of 2017, COFCO Fulinmen released its new product "Fulinmen Nutritionist Edible Plant Blended Oil", and at the same time disclosed the formula proportion and nutritional ingredients. Wang Qingrong, the leader of Fulinmen, believes that in order to respect consumers'right to know and rebuild the image of the industry, it is necessary to do so.
The new national standard will regulate the development of the industry in terms of system, greatly promote the industry enterprises to improve product quality and carry out technological research and development. With the implementation of the new national standard, the market structure of edible blended oil will face tremendous adjustment, and more blended oil production enterprises will join the open formula camp.
