Nutella and Palm Oil: The Spread That Stood Trial

In the early months of 2017 the Ferrero company did something a maker of chocolate spread almost never has to do: it went on the defensive in public, bought advertising time on Italian television, and sent its people out to explain, patiently and repeatedly, that its most famous product would not give anyone cancer. The adverts showed the jar, spoke of quality and care, and reassured a jittery nation that Nutella was safe to spread on a child’s morning toast. To an outsider it looked faintly absurd — a beloved hazelnut spread mounting a legal-sounding defence of its own honour. But Ferrero was not being paranoid. A real scientific report had landed the previous year, a major European supermarket chain had pulled palm-oil products from its shelves partly because of it, and the word “Nutella” had become welded, in the public mind, to the word “carcinogen.” The company was answering a charge. The strange thing about the charge is that the underlying science was largely correct, and the conclusion drawn from it was largely wrong.

The report that started it

The kernel is a document, and it is a serious one. In May 2016 the European Food Safety Authority — EFSA, the EU’s food-risk body, the nearest thing Europe has to a scientific referee on what is safe to eat — published a scientific opinion on a family of process contaminants that form when vegetable oils are refined at high temperatures. The chief culprits it named were glycidyl fatty acid esters (GE), along with two related compounds, 3-MCPD and 2-MCPD. These are not ingredients anyone adds. They are by-products, created during the refining step that turns crude vegetable oil into the clear, neutral, shelf-stable oil the food industry runs on, and they form in the greatest quantity when the oil is deodorised at high heat, above roughly 200 degrees Celsius.

Two things in the report gave it teeth. First, glycidyl esters release glycidol when digested, and glycidol is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a “probable human carcinogen” — and, more precisely, as genotoxic, meaning it can damage DNA directly, the kind of hazard for which regulators are reluctant to name any comfortably safe dose. Second, EFSA’s data showed that among all the common refined vegetable oils, palm oil and palm fat contained by far the highest levels of these glycidyl esters — roughly double those found in most other oils. Palm oil’s chemistry and the temperatures at which it is typically refined make it the worst offender in the group. Every sentence of that is true, sourced, and was never seriously contested. It is the solid ground on which everything that followed was built.

Italy’s palm-oil war

EFSA published in May 2016, and Italy was already primed to receive it, because Italy had been fighting about palm oil for a couple of years on entirely separate grounds. A vigorous consumer campaign had been running against the ingredient, driven partly by health suspicion and partly by the environmental case — the clearing of Southeast Asian rainforest for oil-palm plantations, the loss of orangutan habitat, the carbon released from drained peatland. “Senza olio di palma,” palm-oil-free, had become a marketing badge splashed across Italian biscuits and spreads, a way for a brand to signal virtue to an anxious shopper. Palm oil, in other words, was already the folk-devil of the Italian food aisle before EFSA said a word about refining contaminants.

Into that heat the EFSA report dropped like a match. The connection to Nutella was direct and, for a headline writer, irresistible: Nutella’s recipe uses palm oil, palm oil is the oil highest in the newly notorious carcinogenic contaminant, therefore Nutella. In early 2017 the giant Italian supermarket cooperative Coop Italia announced it would stop selling own-brand products containing palm oil, and the reporting around the move made the EFSA finding its centrepiece. The press did the rest. “Nutella cancer risk” ran, in one wording or another, across Italian and then international outlets. Reuters and others reported the EFSA science accurately enough, but the science travelled attached to a brand name and a frightening noun, and it was the brand name and the noun that lodged. This is the moment the story went to trial in the only court that matters to a food company: the court of the breakfast table.

The speed of the leap is the striking thing. EFSA’s opinion was a technical document about refining chemistry, hedged and quantified in the careful language such bodies use, and it named palm oil among several oils and infants among several exposure groups. By the time it reached the front page it had been compressed into three words and a brand — Nutella, cancer, palm oil — with every qualifier boiled off in transit. That compression is the engine of nearly every food scare: a nuanced risk assessment enters the press at one end and a single frightening noun comes out the other, because the noun is the only part most readers can carry away. Ferrero, watching its flagship product become the face of a hazard the report had discussed in micrograms, faced a problem no amount of correct chemistry easily solves. You cannot un-print a headline, and you certainly cannot un-frighten a parent by handing them a table of refining temperatures.

Ferrero’s counter-campaign was, by the standards of food-safety disputes, extraordinary. The company argued — correctly, and with data — that not all palm oil is equal, because the contaminant depends overwhelmingly on how the oil is refined. Ferrero stated that it sourced palm oil that was processed at controlled, lower temperatures and under conditions designed to keep glycidyl-ester formation to a minimum, and that its product therefore sat well within the emerging safety guidance. It defended palm oil as, in its view, the right ingredient for the texture and shelf life that make Nutella what it is — the reason the spread stays glossy and does not separate. Whether one takes the company at its word, its central technical claim was sound: the hazard lives in the refining, and refining can be controlled.

The fork: from “contaminant” to “cancer spread”

Here is the precise point the record and the myth part company, and it is a single missing word: dose. EFSA’s report was a piece of risk assessment, and risk is hazard multiplied by exposure. The report did identify glycidyl esters as a genotoxic hazard. It also, in the same breath, quantified how much people were actually consuming and where it placed them relative to a level of concern — and it flagged that the highest exposures, and the group most worth worrying about, were infants and young children fed formula, because refined vegetable oils go into infant formula and a baby’s exposure per kilogram of body weight is high. The report was, in large part, a prompt to the industry to lower the contaminant, which the industry then did: over the following years, tightened processing and, in 2018, EU regulatory limits on glycidyl esters in vegetable oils and infant formula drove the levels down substantially.

None of that nuance survives the phrase “Nutella causes cancer.” The myth performs a familiar amputation. It keeps the scary half of the sentence — genotoxic probable carcinogen — and severs the half that gives it meaning: at what dose, in whom, and reduced by how much once the refining changed. A genotoxic hazard at the microgram level in a food eaten by the spoonful is a real thing to manage and a poor thing to panic over, and the difference between managing and panicking is precisely the quantity the headline dropped. It is the same move, structurally, that turns any measured toxicological finding into a folk-devil: isolate the frightening property, forget the amount, and let the brand name carry the dread. The contaminant was real. The dose was the story, and the dose is what the panic threw away.

Why palm oil, of all the villains

There is a reason the fear attached itself to palm oil specifically, and it is worth naming because it is more about us than about the oil. Palm oil is the perfect modern food-devil. It is industrial, invisible and everywhere — in spreads, biscuits, margarine, soap, cosmetics, half the processed aisle — an ingredient most people cannot picture and did not knowingly choose. It carries a genuine environmental sin in the deforestation of Borneo and Sumatra, which gives the health fear a moral undertow and lets the two anxieties reinforce each other until they feel like one. And its name sounds like an additive, faintly tropical and faintly synthetic, even though it is simply the pressed fruit of a palm. An ingredient that is hidden, ubiquitous, ethically compromised and slightly alien is an ingredient primed to absorb any new fear that comes along. When EFSA’s refining data arrived, palm oil was already wearing the black hat.

This is the same appetite we will meet again and again on this desk — the deep modern suspicion that the industrial food system is hiding something harmful in the parts of the label we cannot decode. It powers the recurring alarm over additives and preservatives, the reflex that a chemical-sounding name is a chemical-sounding threat; it is a first cousin of the sulfite panic that blames a wine label for a headache and a relation of the older, deliberately engineered doubts traced in the story of how the sugar industry manufactured uncertainty about its own product. The suspicion is not baseless. Industry has hidden things, and cheap ingredients have been slipped into food we trusted. But a real appetite for scrutiny, turned loose without a sense of dose, will devour a chocolate spread as readily as a genuine fraud, and learn nothing in the process.

What it is really about

Strip the chemistry back and the palm-oil scare is a story about trust and legibility — about how much of what we eat is now made by processes no diner can see, at temperatures no diner can judge, using ingredients no diner chose. That is a real and reasonable unease. Most of us cannot evaluate a glycidyl ester, cannot control how our biscuits were refined, and cannot do anything with an EFSA opinion except feel afraid or feel reassured, depending on which headline reached us first. Into that helplessness a single word like “carcinogen” lands with enormous force, because it is the one part of the science that requires no expertise to feel. The panic is the sound of people trying to exercise caution over a food system that has outrun their ability to inspect it.

The genuinely useful response is the one the boring parts of the report actually produced: identify the contaminant, measure the exposure, worry hardest about the infants, set a legal limit, and make the refiners lower it — which happened, quietly, over the following years, with almost none of the coverage the scare received. Ferrero standing on television defending a jar is the memorable image, but the meaningful story is the unglamorous machinery of regulation doing roughly what it exists to do. Nutella went to trial and, on the evidence, was acquitted of the charge as stated. The palm oil in it did carry the highest load of a real, DNA-damaging contaminant, and that was worth knowing and worth fixing. The leap from worth managing to cancer in a jar is where a legitimate finding became a folk fear — and the casualty, as usual, was the sense of proportion that would have let a worried parent tell a real hazard from a frightening word.