Cargill’s technical teams have the capabilities and ingredient access to design customized fat systems to help customers hit their nutritional goals.

What would grocery store shelves look like in a world without solid fats? Imagine chocolate bars dripping through their wrappers, icing sliding off layer cakes and snack cakes that collapse after their whipped cream fillings ooze out. That's exactly what would happen to many foods without the critical structuring properties provided by solid fats.

Developing a fat system that duplicates the essential functional properties only found in certain fats, while limiting saturated fat, ranks among the more challenging tasks a product developer can face. One approach used by many food scientists is the pursuit of creative ways to first identify and then enhance the desired structural properties provided by saturated fats that are essential to achieving the desired integrity in a finished product.  Although this strategy works well in many applications, some require a different approach.

Solid fats are essential for applications requiring structure, body, mouthfeel in addition to providing a means for incorporating air (the "light and fluffy" factor) and homogenizing liquid and solid oil phases (shortening blends).  Unfortunately, fats that are solid at room temperature tend to be higher in saturated fat.

Take, for example, cocoa butter. This unique fat's fatty acid structure is responsible for chocolate's most attractive attributes: solid in the wrapper and melts away cleanly right at body temperature. Cocoa butter is composed of two saturated long-chain fatty acids around one monounsaturated long-chain fatty acid. However, disturb this architecture, and the resulting chocolate is waxy and unappealing.

Certain saturated fatty acids are known to raise low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or "bad" cholesterol, as well as total cholesterol levels, both of which are associated with heart disease. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that Americans limit their consumption of saturated fatty acids to 7 to 10% of calories and replace them with foods that supply monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids. Food manufacturers are looking for new ways to accomplish this replacement while maintaining the appeal of their products.

At Cargill, not only do we have a full spectrum of oils, we also have the technical expertise to tailor fat systems to our customers' needs. With the depth and breadth of Cargill’s technical resources, we have the ability to use a comprehensive approach to resolve product development challenges. The comprehensive or “systems” approach offers tremendous advantages, and efficiencies, over a single ingredient approach for arriving at a timely customer solution.

For example, if we manipulate a fat component, we can do something with another ingredient or perhaps the process to make sure the end product is on target. We can make the outcome neutral or perhaps even improve the end result by engaging in co-development and co-innovation where we learn together with our customers.

An example of our product development success in this area is with a flour tortilla.  Industry standard called for two types of partially hydrogenated shortening blends.  However, when consumers began to demand trans fat reduction or removal, the tortilla industry was forced to take a look at zero trans fat options which contained blends of liquids and solids. 

What Cargill’s technical team figured out, is that in order to get the trans fat to zero grams per serving, there had to be a bit of liquid oil present.  The presence of varying amounts of liquid oils alone in flour tortilla formulations are known for their potential to create a variety of production related issues. Depending on the amount, liquid oils are also known to contribute to what tortilla manufacturers consider the two most significant issues to avoid:  individual tortillas sticking to each other in the package, and tortillas that tear (rip) while being used. To make sure the recommended formulation worked, Cargill helped customers figure out what needed to be changed in the mixing procedure such as the order of ingredient introduction, water volume and optimum mix time in order to make a tortilla that met their requirements.

If customers need immediate innovative fat systems, our same technical teams are primed for co-development breakthroughs. Cargill is continually creating innovative, customized solutions to our customers' problems all along the supply chain. When it comes to meeting the challenge of designing heart-healthy fat systems to replace the higher saturated fat variety, we not only make the cake — we keep the icing on it, too.