This last year the FDA officially updated the nutrition fact label requirements for all retail products. This means that if you manufacture a food product, your design and quality assurance teams will have to update the information that you include in the nutrition facts on the back of your product package.

If you buy commodity oils, sometimes understanding the pricing and how it is structured is a sigh of relief. It’s based off the CBOT, which is public information you can check to understand how your costs are changing and why.

The olive oil market historically hasn’t been so easy. That’s because it’s not really a commodity oil, but in the bulk world it often works as such.

Everyone who buys bulk olive oil knows that the harvest this year has been really tough. Prices have been high, and it’s affected suppliers and buyers across the board. It’s not just your company, prices have gone up for everyone. It’s challenging to say the least, and we understand how much this can affect your business.

As I’ve been working with customers trying to help them figure out how to handle these rising costs, we’ve had a number of suggestions that have consistently come up time and time again.

Expeller Pressed vs. Non-GMO: the interrelatedness of these two traits are a common point of discussion for me. Is all non-GMO oil expeller pressed? Is all expeller pressed oil automatically non-GMO?

These two terms are actually completely independent of each other, but often get confused because of how often they are used together in today’s natural oil descriptions.

Most people assume that to save the most money on their bulk oil ingredients, that they should be contracting their oil at an ideal time. The answer is, as always, more complex than that. Chances are that if you are booking canola or soy (or an oil that is based off those markets) that a year-long contracted price may be more expensive than the current spot market.

And just why is this? We’d like to walk you through some of the reasoning behind this — it all has to do with the CBOT, and how future bookings work.

Using Olive Pomace Oil as opposed to a different grade of olive oil, or even a different seed oil, will have some pros and cons. There’s reasons why a food manufacturer, food service distributor or even a restaurant might want to use Pomace, and why they may not want to.

My goal is, with this article, to give you a thorough run down on both the pros and cons of using olive pomace oil. After that, I’ll review the bottom line on how to decide whether to use pomace no matter if you’re a food manufacturer or a distributor.

It’s always interesting to me to look at the natural and organic trends on a larger scale; they show the incredible power that consumers have to shape what we as food manufacturers make. It’s also amazing to me how, by acting as consumers, can shape this change through what we buy.

With this in mind, I recently ran across an infographic that I thought would be worth sharing. It outlined the timeline of the growth of the “natural” and organic food market, from the mid-90s to now. The changes are gradual at first, but clearly snowball in recent years.

Want to know the down-low about sunflower oil? Here’s 10 quick facts.

What’s the truth? There’s so much hearsay that gets thrown around related to olive oil these days, because it’s such a hot button topic.

In this article, I’ll honestly answer both the classic and the obscure myths, and try to shed some objective light on the matter. Does olive oil get better with age? Does heat destroy the health properties? Does the “fridge” test work? Is Extra Virgin that much healthier than other grades of olive oil?

How is Organic Virgin Coconut Oil different than Refined Coconut Oil?

These two types of coconut oil are actually quite different, and it’s important to know the exact differences before choosing one over the other. Depending on what you’re using the oil for, you’ll usually find that one will fit your purposes much better than the other. 

The number of organic farms is on the rise — in fact, from 2014 to 2016 the number of certified organic farms has risen by 6.2% nationwide, totaling 14,979 farms. This is an increase of about 1,000 organic farms in the last couple of years.

The top five states leading in organic farmland acres are California, Montana (my home state), Wisconsin, New York and South Dakota. California leads the running with 688,000 acres, while Montana has caught up closely behind with 417,000 ares.

Is all expeller pressed canola oil available automatically non-GMO? Is all non-GMO canola oil automatically expeller pressed?

Much of the Non-GMO Canola Oil that you’ll find nowadays is in fact expeller pressed, so it makes sense that the opposite, that expeller pressed canola oil would automatically be non-gmo… Right? Not so fast.

I talk with buyers every day who are debating how to choose the right oil supplier — and their job depends on it. Of course, oils are usually not the only product that they are debating, but but the analysis process looks pretty similar no matter what ingredients you’re responsible for sourcing.

In the vendor search process, you have to uncover a lot of information and answer a lot of questions for yourself. In this article, we’ll address each of the questions below and explain how each vendors’ answer could affect your final choice.

Should you use Olive Pomace Oil or should you use Sunflower Oil (or even safflower for that matter)? These are some of the important oil comparisons that procurement teams and R&D departments have to do as food manufacturers.

And if you’re a home chef? We’ll you probably equally debate this standing in the aisle of your grocery store. Whether you’re a home chef or if you are in industrial food manufacturing, we’ll look at the pros and cons of these two oils for each industry.

For easy comparisons’ sake, I’m going to look at sunflower grouped together with it’s counterpart, safflower oil. Sunflower oil has historically been more available and popular over the last 30 years, but in today’s natural food market, safflower oil is becoming equally used and in demand. For that reason, I think it’s only fair to compare using Olive Pomace Oil to using Sunflower OR Safflower Oil.

“RBD” is a term that you will hear commonly used when people are talking about oils of many different types. But what does it mean?

RBD is an acronym, which stands for Refined, Bleached and Deodorized. This acronym describes how the oil is processed, and whether it is a refined or unrefined product. It is used to describe a myriad of oils from canola to soy to olive to sunflower to grapeseed and more. However, the refining process is probably very different than you may be picturing, so I’ll tell you a little bit more about it.