Lang
A new study has found that the use of palm oil in supermarket products is not as widespread as previously believed.
The study, titled "Does Palm Oil Really Dominate Supermarkets?", published by IOP Publishing on 24 October 2025, tested the widely circulated claim that 50% of supermarket products contain palm oil. It found that across the three supermarket chains examined, only 8% of products directly mentioned palm oil, while vegetable oil derivatives suggested the presence of palm oil in up to 33% of goods.
The study, led by Emily Megard of scientific consultancy Borneo Futures, analysed the ingredient lists of nearly 1,600 food products from three supermarket chains — Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, Sainsbury's in the United Kingdom and Woolworths in Australia — to assess the prevalence of palm oil and palm kernel oil, alongside other major vegetable oil crops.
Across the supermarkets, palm oil and/or palm kernel oil were explicitly listed in around 7.9% of products, while corn (19%), rapeseed (15%) and soybean (14%) were more commonly cited.
Up to 40% of products in the supermarkets could also have contained palm oil through unspecified vegetable oils or oleochemicals, which were found in around 18% of all products sampled.
The study said:
"This highlights a broader challenge: modern processed foods are part of complex global supply chains that rely on fungible commodities such as palm oil."
"While traceability mechanisms such as those promoted under the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) aim to strengthen accountability at the early stages of the supply chain, consumer-facing label transparency remains inadequate."
The researchers called for clearer food labelling and broader system-wide impact assessments to allow consumers to make fully informed choices aligned with their values and goals.
The study said:
"Consumers should have access to detailed product attributes, such as the percentage of palm oil sourced from Indonesia, Malaysia, or smallholder plantations, the origin of the peanuts in peanut butter, or the proportion of soybeans from regions such as Mato Grosso versus São Paulo."
The study concluded that across the three major Western supermarket chains, palm oil was present in up to 40% of products when oleochemicals and oils of uncertain origin were included.
The study said:
"For the three supermarkets we sampled, in 2024, we can conclude that palm oil, palm kernel oil and their derivatives were absent from 50% of listed products, packaged goods, food items, or packaged food items sold online. In fact, within food products, the prevalence of palm was on a par with that of cocoa."
"We suspect that the '50% claim' is either an outdated statistic, was always inaccurate, applies to other regions of the world or other supermarket chains, or was always impossible to verify due to the uncertainty surrounding the crop source of oleochemicals and 'unspecified oils'."
The researchers said it remains unclear whether the use of palm oil in supermarket products has genuinely declined since 2006 due to product reformulation, or whether the original statistic was simply inaccurate or lacked a reliable scientific basis.
At the national level, in the countries where the sampled supermarkets are located, domestic vegetable oil use data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) pointed to a relative decline in palm oil consumption.
From 2006 to 2022 (the last year for which data is available), the share of palm oil and palm kernel oil in the domestic vegetable oil supply covered by the study fell from 29% to 9% in Australia, from 38% to 16% in the United Kingdom, and from 50% to 20% in the Netherlands.
Over the same period, globally, palm oil's share of vegetable oil supply rose from 33% to 35%, which may indicate a shift in palm oil consumption from countries of the Global North to those of the Global South.
The study said:
"With global palm oil production increasing, and relative consumption shifting increasingly towards countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, China and Malaysia, it is unlikely that any substitution of palm oil with other vegetable oils in countries of the Global North has produced net environmental and social benefits."
"Rather than achieving a genuine reduction in environmental and social harm, any shift away from palm oil in Europe and Australia... redirects rather than resolves the underlying problems associated with the expansion of oil palm cultivation and production."