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As new European Union rules on mineral oil contamination in food move toward enforcement on 1 January 2027, the palm oil industry finds itself with a head start over rival edible oil sectors, thanks to early investment in food-safety standards that others are now scrambling to replicate.
Formal adoption of the regulations by the European Commission is expected next month, with maximum levels for mineral oil aromatic hydrocarbons, known by the acronym MOAH, applying from 1 January 2027. Some additional requirements will be phased in over a later period.
Coconut oil exporters in the Philippines, who ship more than 60 per cent of their crude coconut oil to the EU, have publicly warned that testing equipment is expensive, difficult to operate, and not yet widely available at farm and mill level.
In Spain, the Senate's Agriculture Committee has examined the impact of the proposed restrictions on olive oil producers, including the additional costs and practical difficulties facing the sector.
Campaigners and lawmakers, meanwhile, have clashed over how far the new rules should go and how quickly industry can realistically comply. The consumer organisation Foodwatch has pushed for stringent restrictions on mineral oil contamination in food, calling for limits low enough to prevent any detectable contamination with potentially carcinogenic MOAH compounds.
MOAH sits in the same broad family as the mineral oils used in industrial lubricants. Presses, conveyors, and decanters all need lubrication, and when the lubricants used are not food-grade, trace amounts can migrate into the product as it is pressed, stored, and moved. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) identifies machinery lubricants as a potential source of contamination, which can occur at several stages of food production, including through machinery, processing aids, packaging, and environmental exposure.
EFSA's 2023 risk assessment found that certain MOAH compounds may be associated with genotoxicity and carcinogenicity, meaning they could damage DNA or contribute to cancer risk. As a result, Brussels is shifting from voluntary guidance to legally enforceable limits, measured in milligrams per kilogram, across a long list of products that includes vegetable oils and fats, dairy, cocoa, cereals, tree nuts, spices, and infant food.
For some, MOAH compliance has been framed as a burden imposed on tropical agriculture by Western bureaucracy. Yet the palm oil experience suggests that tropical producers who invested early are now setting the pace, while sectors still lobbying for delay have a working blueprint sitting in front of them.
That blueprint comes from palm oil, an unlikely source given that the sector spent much of the past decade cast as the food industry's designated villain, blamed for deforestation, the decline of orangutan populations, land conflicts, the displacement of local communities, and virtually every headline about vanishing rainforests.
Years of scrutiny from concerned NGOs, retailers, and publicity-conscious buyers such as Nestlé effectively pushed producers to act long before regulators did. Nestlé's published sourcing policies document its environmental requirements, supplier monitoring, and use of satellite technology.
Some producers, including Indonesia's Musim Mas, made the switch years ago. The company states that it has used exclusively food-grade lubricants in food-production machinery since 2018, with published contamination controls covering production-process changes, supplier monitoring, and regular internal and external testing.
The infrastructure, testing protocols, and supply-chain discipline that the rest of the food industry is now racing to build were, for parts of the palm oil sector, already a cost of doing business.
Malaysian palm oil major SD Guthrie is a case in point. The group began assessing mineral oil hydrocarbon levels across its Malaysian palm oil mills as early as 2019. A scientific paper published that year examined mineral oil saturated hydrocarbon (MOSH) contamination at two Sime Darby Plantation mills in Malaysia, comparing their production methods and contamination levels.
In 2022, that groundwork was formalised as Project OMEGA, a company-wide programme to convert every mill the group operates across Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands into certified food-safe facilities. The programme was announced in April 2022, initially targeting the group's 33 Malaysian mills before being extended to the other countries.
Out of that work came KALIS, developed through systematic contamination prevention and supply-chain controls at source. According to SD Guthrie, KALIS carries product specifications of MOSH below 10 ppm and MOAH below 1 ppm.
Under the EU's latest draft regulations, many edible oils will initially face a MOAH limit of 4 mg/kg, falling to 2 mg/kg in 2028. Coconut and groundnut oils sold to consumers or used as food ingredients will have an initial allowance of 6 mg/kg, falling to 4 mg/kg in 2028 and 2 mg/kg in 2030. Argan oil will initially have a 10 mg/kg allowance, while olive oils have separate implementation dates. KALIS's stated MOAH specification is therefore below the proposed initial limits for these categories, although the precise comparison depends on each product's regulatory classification.
A premium variant, KALIS+, has been developed on the same platform, with free fatty acid levels held below 3 per cent, built for speciality manufacturing where purity requirements go beyond the regulatory floor.
Coconut oil and olive oil producers now facing the EU deadline are not being asked to invent something new. They are being asked to catch up with a standard that a tropical commodity sector already met, on its own initiative, under considerably less regulatory pressure than exists today.
Being forced to adapt early rather than late has turned out to be a competitive advantage for the palm oil industry.
Source: The European Magazine