Palm Oil is in over half of the products on supermarket shelves. To feed this need for cheap palm oil massive pieces of rich Indonesian & Malaysian forest are bulldozed and torched. every. single. day.
So much so that in 2017 Indonesia produced more carbon emissions than the USA!
All of this because palm oil is cheap.
But it is only cheap if someone bears the cost.
The cost of palm oil is being paid by future generations, by the tigers, elephants and orangutans and by the local people.
- 300 football fields of forest are cleared an hour to make way for palm oil production.
- In the past 10 years – the orangutan population has been halved by the palm oil industry.
- The palm oil industry ranks in the top 4 worst industries for forced child labour (i think that’s polite language for slavery).
- At this rate the Sumatran tiger will be extinct in less than 3 years.
Palm oil is often a hidden ingredient – hiding on the list as one of its many pseudonyms or “E Numbers”. Because it can be difficult to check items in the supermarket aisle or as part of your shopping routine Real Food Grocer has decided to make it easy for our customers by doing the checking for you.
At Real Food Grocer, we aim for palm oil free products and will only ever sell palm oil free or CSPO products.*
We check all our products when they are new to our store and re-check the ingredients every six months in our internal palm oil audit. We also check if we hear about changes on the grapevine – whether they are changes of recipes or formulas or changes of company management.
Our overall preference is to sell products and support manufacturers who share our concerns about palm oil and have made the effort to declare their stance on palm oil publicly.
*We do not support Round Table Palm Oil as their standards are too low and they do not audit all of their members leaving many manufacturers who are operating irresponsibly to continue to have this certification.
