Healthy transition
Local company plays key role in helping food businesses meet FDA guidelines
Three out of every five meals and snacks consumed in the United States can trace their roots to an inconspicuous research and development facility tucked away on a quiet Bartlett boulevard.
While their products may not be recognizable to the average consumer, the end results are.
Stratas Foods makes edible oils and shortenings for many of the nation’s leading retailers, restaurant chains and celebrity chefs.
Now with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s ban on partially hydrogenated oils, the local ingredient maker has been thrown into the mix of a national trans fat transition.
“The three areas that we work in are food service, which is the restaurants and small businesses; the large food companies, which would be your top-100s; and then we also do the retail bottle and salad oils,” said Roger Daniels, Stratas vice president of research, development and innovation.
“Walk in to any of the major grocery stores out there … and the private label products are more than likely a Stratas offering.”
Stratas was formed in 2008 as a joint venture between Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. of Chicago and Memphis-based ACH Food Companies.
The latter evolved from the Humko Corp. oil processing factory that operated on Thomas Street in the 1950s.
Stratas’ corporate headquarters is located about three miles from the Research, Development and Innovation Center. Both are located in the Memphis area, while the large-scale production is handled at six facilities in California, Georgia, Illinois and Texas. Stratas employs about 1,000 people nationwide, including 150 in the Memphis area.
“World-class research as well as the application side of it have been in Memphis for years,” Daniels said.
“It started with Alton Bailey, who was the origi-
nal director of research at Humko, and he wrote the bible on edible oil processing.”
Bailey’s “Industrial Oil and Fat Products” is still considered the leading comprehensive tome on edible oils and fats despite being written over a half a century ago.
“This is three volumes of everything that you would ever want to know about fats and oils,” Daniels said.
“I’ve carried it with me ever since 1979.”
Stratas’ research team has been working on replacement options for partially hydrogenated oils since 2003, when the FDA first started exploring the safety of artificial trans fats.
The agency concluded that consuming trans fat raises the levels of lowdensity lipoprotein, or LDL, cholesterol which significantly increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
In 2006, the FDA required companies to label the amount of trans fat in their products.
In 2013, they made a preliminary determination that partially hydrogenated oils, also known as PHOs, were not safe. The final coffin nail came in June when companies were given until 2018 to completely remove PHOs from the food supply.
“Most of the conversions are complete,” Rogers said.
“And for those that haven’t been fully converted, we have the replacement options waiting in the wings,”
Because different oils have unique flavor profiles due to their chemical compositions, one of the main obstacles Stratas faced was finding the right composition to fit each customer’s needs.
“Different oils have different flavors associated with them, and it’s by pairing, much like you do wine with food, we have customers who pair their oil type with the food type they are making,” Daniels said.
Daniels said cottonseed and corn oils work best with potatoes, peanut oil is considered the industry standard for fish, and blends of cotton and corn oil pair best with other proteins.
“As consumers we like the way our french fries taste, and a lot of that really comes from the oil itself,” Stratas vice president of sales and marketing David Tillman said.
High oleic soybean and sunflower oils, are becoming increasingly popular PHO replacements.
Oleic acid is a monounsaturated fatty acid commonly found in olives.
Through selective breeding, farmers can increase the levels of the naturally occurring oleic acid in sunflowers and soybeans.
“Just like its own fingerprint, every oil has its differences,” Tillman said. “The higher oleic value, the more stable the oil is in a high-heat application.”
In addition to the stability and extended fry life, high oleic oils have been found to have positive health benefits when used as a substitute for trans fats.
When it comes to shortenings, finding a stable substitute to PHOs has proved more difficult.
The hydrogenation process, which is responsible for the creation of artificial trans fat, plays a crucial role when converting a liquid oil into a solid or semisolid shortening. Traditional palm oil has become a common substitute, but it lacks the stability of partially hydrogenated cotton-soy blends for baking applications.
To compensate for this, Stratas developed a new product known as “flex palm.”
“The biggest innovation that we’ve had is called functional crystallization,” Daniels said.
This process converts the palm oil’s crystals, which naturally look like pine needles under a microscope, into a more stable honeycomb shape that resembles the structure of a PHO.
Rogers said the honeycomb shape is important because “the liquid oil actually lives inside and the solid is on the outside.”
“We’re using an input that has no trans fat and we’re getting a product that is as good if not better than trans-containing products,” Daniels added.