The Wendy’s burger chain has vowed to ditch its present frying oil for a non-trans fat oil made from a corn-soy blend.
Is this a lost opportunity for canola oil, which can be both non-trans and have the lowest saturated fat oil?
Not at all, says Willy Loh, a U.S. canola marketer for Cargill.
“I’m terribly optimistic,” said Loh, who tries to sell high oleic canola frying oil to major commercial users like Wendy’s, the third largest, hamburger chain in the United States.
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“The developments this summer bode very well for the focus on saturated fats … . This recent shift by Wendy’s really is a confirmation of that trend.”
Wendy’s choice of a corn-soy blend may not seem like a good saturated fat development, because both corn and soy oil are higher in saturated fat than canola oil. But Loh, whose company is providing Wendy’s with its new oil, said the restaurant chain could have switched to a non-trans fat palm oil.
If it had done so, it would have shown that the saturated fat level was not a major concern, because palm oil is high in saturated fat. But Wendy’s avoided the cheap palm oil and instead embraced a more complicated blend that had lower saturated fat.
Other food processors have also refused to move to higher-saturated fat palm oil.
“These are large companies with very deep expertise in frying and they were certainly aware that there was a tropical oil option, a low cost tropical oil option to do this,” said Loh.
“Not only was trans not acceptable, but driving down trans while having high saturates was also not where they see the food industry heading.”
Wendy’s switch to a non-trans fat corn-soy blend is just a switch from hydrogenated corn oil, which the company has relied upon for decades. Not switching to canola shouldn’t be seen as a blow, Loh said.
“They have always used a corn,” said Loh.
“When we work with these very large customers on these very complex problems, we do lay out all the different oils, we do go through various steps of testing with all of them. Whatever the customer decides usually ends up as a reflection of some very unique operational issues that each company has.”
In Canada and the United States, labelling laws forcing food product companies to reveal trans fat levels have been coming into force.
Those laws don’t apply to meals sold by restaurant chains like Wendy’s, but a number of fast food companies have been trying to change anyway.
Several years ago McDonald’s announced that it wanted to radically reduce the amount of trans fat oil in its products in the U.S., but so far has not been able to do so. But in its restaurants in Denmark and Israel, McDonald’s does not use trans fats for cooking french fries.
