News
Sunflower oil preferred frying oil in snack food industry
By National Sunflower Association
The snack food industry in Canada and the US prefer sunflower oil when frying snack foods. The oil has become the new bench mark oil that all other oils are compared with.
May 15, 2008
Sunflower
oil has achieved a ‘Cadillac’ status in the food industry according to Larry Kleingartner who will be speaking at the 99th
annual meeting of the American Oil Chemists Society in Seattle on May 19. Sunflower’s NuSun® oil is now the preferred
frying oil for snack food industry in the U.S. and Canada.
“NuSun is the bench mark oil that all other oils are now compared with
in testing laboratories,” says Kleingartner.
Kleingartner
will be part of a panel on ‘Trait Modified Food Oils: Characteristics and Their Use’. A lot of work has been done with other
oilseeds trying to mimic NuSun’s fatty acid structure. Getting that work done and introduced to
growers takes a long time, said Tom Young, NSA vice president and a farmer in
central South Dakota. “We started
this process in 1995 and now our transition to NuSun is complete. We certainly had our challenges but our
entire industry, farmers and public breeders worked together to get the job
done. It’s paying dividends today,”
according to Young.
In addition
to providing excellent frying stability, NuSun is very low in saturated fatty
acids. The oil is neutral in taste and
does not override the flavor of a potato or corn chip. The oil has an excellent health profile as
well having out performed olive oil in cholesterol reduction in a Penn State human feeding trial.
Kleingartner
will review these functional characteristics and the history of NuSun at the Seattle meeting. “This is a great opportunity to show case a
real success story with a national audience of oil chemists,” said
Kleingartner. The meeting draws several
thousand oil chemists and food technologists from around the world.
.
