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OUR MISSION IS TO STOP TROPICAL RAINFOREST DEFORESTATION BY PALM OIL PLANTATIONS. THAT'S WHY, IN OUR 100% PLANT-BASED SPREAD, PALM OIL HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH AN ALTERNATIVE GUARANTEED NOT TO CAUSE DEFORESTATION: SHEA BUTTER


As of July 2024, we have already sold 33 million products. In doing so, we have saved over 1.999.310 kilograms of palm oil, which would have required more than 5.261.342 square metres of palm oil plantations to produce. 

We are making a measurable difference, and we are very proud of that.

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With The Flower Farm, I am happy to be able to draw attention to an essential issue: deforestation.

Palm oil is often associated with deforestation. To a large extent, this is justified, as 85% of all palm oil is made in an unsustainable way. This palm oil is one of the world's biggest causes of deforestation. Millions of acres of rainforest have been burned to make way for oil palm plantations. And deforestation is still happening today. I lived in Indonesia for four years, and saw areas of rainforest become plantations with my own eyes. This experience has added to my motivation to do something about it.

I am trying to reduce the solution to this significant problem to a relatively simple principle. It goes like this: if we use less palm oil, then the demand for palm oil decreases. If the demand for palm oil decreases, fewer plantations are required. Rainforest is often cut down for plantations. So, when we consume less palm oil, then less rainforest is cut down. It's that simple.

That’s why at The Flower Farm we make spread in which we replace palm oil with an alternative. There is undoubtedly no deforestation required for this alternative, because it comes from an entirely different source: shea trees.

Spread without palm oil has an impact. For example, with a family of four, you remove more than 17 kilograms of palm oil demand per year. All you need to do is switch to palm oil-free spread . And when you know that for those 17 kilograms, over 44 square metres of oil palm plantation are required, you know it matters. Imagine if we all started doing that! ! 

As of September 2023 we have already sold 24 million products. In doing so, we have saved over 995.950 kilograms of palm oil, which would have required more than 2,545,000 square metres of palm oil plantations to produce. We are making a measurable difference, and I am very proud of that.

It is important to me that I can tell my children that I did something about it. I hope their generation can still enjoy the power of the rainforest.

Marcel van Wing

The Flower Farm

Did you know that palm oil is used in more than 50% of all products in the supermarket? That is why the demand for palm oil is already 75 million tons per year today and will grow to 264 million tons in the next 25 years (source USDA, 2019). That’s an unreal amount.

Currently, 85% of palm oil is not produced sustainably. For this palm oil, millions of hectares of rainforest in Asia have now been systematically burned to make way for oil palm plantations. The sad thing is that even today, this deforestation continues at a high pace. The rainforest is responsible for more than 80% of our earth’s biodiversity, which is why it’s so crucial that we protect the rainforests that still exist.

It is important to know that there is also palm oil that is RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) certified. For palm oil with this certification, it is claimed that no deforestation is taking place to produce it. That is encouraging, of course. The problem is that, for years, RSPO has been heavily criticised about whether their palm oil is genuinely deforestation-free. Moreover, RSPO is not mentioned anywhere on the packaging of a product in the supermarket. As a consumer, you don’t know if you’ve bought palm oil for which deforestation has or quite possibly has not occurred. This makes it impossible for anyone to make a responsible, sustainable choice.

As long as it not clear what kind of palm oil is in regular spread, and the many doubts about the truth of RSPO-certified palm oil remain, we will use an alternative which is 100% certain to be deforestation-free: shea butter. After all, no plantations are required for shea trees, and these trees do not grow in rainforest areas, but in the wild on the African savannah.

Want to know more about palm oil?

This is what independent sources write about it

Want to know more about palm oil?

Enter the word ‘palm oil’ or ‘deforestation’ into Google, and you’ll be staggered by the number of articles that don’t make you happy. Do the same on YouTube, and you can see and hear it too. We thought it would be good to select a few for you, to bring you up to speed.

Read and judge for yourself. Do you still want to know more? Just Google 'palm' and 'deforestation'.

The shea tree grows naturally in the African savannah. It produces fruit that looks a bit like plums. When these fruits are ripe, they fall off the tree by themselves and are then harvested by hand. The nuts in these fruits are dried, cracked, washed and processed into shea butter.

Shea has many good properties: it is 100 per cent plant-based, has a good fat composition and makes the spread taste delicious. But the main argument why shea butter is the perfect base for our spread is that it does not require deforestation. This is because no plantations are required for the trees, and they do not grow in rainforest areas, but on the savannahs of Africa.

So that’s why shea is the best alternative to palm oil for us: it's guaranteed deforestation-free. And that's just fantastic. 

The Flower Farm is a member of the Global Shea Alliance, which is a non-profit organisation dedicated to shea sustainability. Would you like to know more? Check out the Global Shea Alliance.

Globalshea.com We are also an active member of the Global Shea Alliance. View global shea alliance membership certificate
Coconut has a more positive image than palm oil. But unfortunately it is at least as harmful to nature as palm. Coconut is grown on plantations, just like palm oil. These are often located on vulnerable islands against the coast, which means that, in addition to deforestation, there are also additional problems with soil erosion. In addition, coconut is unfavorable because of the high saturated fat content: 87% in coconut compared to 49% in shea. Occasionally there are incidents with coconut related to the use of monkeys to pick the nuts. That is quite animal unfriendly. If you want to know more about coconut, click on these links:
When we started making The Flower Farm spread, we wanted to do it as honestly as possible. That's why we make it like you can make it yourself at home. We mix sunflower oil, shea butter, water, lemon juice and carrot juice first, then add a pinch of sea salt. To make it bind well, we add a vegetable, natural emulsifier (you can replace this with a little egg yolk, but then it is no longer vegan). Finally, we add vitamins A and D. Spread can be that simple.
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If we use less palm oil, the demand for palm oil decreases. As demand decreases, fewer plantations that require the clearing of rainforest are necessary.

Per year, a family of four can save over 17 kilograms of palm oil just by using palm oil-free spread. Those 17 kilograms would require more than 44 square metres of plantation.

Imagine what we can accomplish together!

HOW DO WE GET TO 17 KILOS OF PALM OIL AND 44 M2 OF PLANTATION PER YEAR?

So almost 18 kilos, but we round it off to 17 kilos.

That doesn’t look very easy to work out, but it is. We assume a family of 4 eating slices of bread, cooking, frying or roasting vegetables or meat in the evening and baking a cake, pie, or biscuits once a month. 

We can assume five slices of bread per person per day, with 10 grams of spread with a palm oil content of 15 per cent spread on each slice

For cooking, frying or roasting, 10 grams of spread with a palm oil content of 40 per cent is used per person per day.

And for a monthly cake, apple pie or biscuits, an average of 200 grams of spread is used containing 40 per cent palm oil.

So a total of 17,750 grams of palm oil can be saved by spreading, baking and frying with The Flower Farm. We round this down to 17 kg.

For our calculation, we assumed an average family consisting of a 40-year-old man, a 40-year-old woman and two children; a boy aged 8 and a girl aged 10.

The Dutch Nutrition Centre’s ‘Wheel of 5’ recommends 6-8 slices of bread per day for a 40-year-old man, 4-5 for a 40-year-old woman, and 4-6 slices each for children. We think that is quite a lot, so we have calculated based on five slices per day per person.

We use a portion size of 10 grams of spread per slice. That is the generally accepted serving size in ‘the industry’ and corresponds to the amount of spreadable fats recommended by the Dutch Nutrition Centre.

The Nutrition Centre assumes that for frying and roasting meat, 10-15 grams of oil or fat is used per meat portion of 100-150 grams.

We determined the average amount of palm oil contained in spread using data from known manufacturers. Spread for spreading contains an average of 60% fat. That fat is partly palm oil, 25% on average. For example, 100 grams of spread contains 15 grams of palm oil: 15%. 

Spread for baking or frying contains 80% fat, of which 50% is palm oil. 100 grams of this spread contains 40 grams of palm oil: 40%.%. 

HOW DO WE GET OVER 44M2 OF PLANTATION?

For this calculation we have assumed the average production of an oil palm plantation according to MVO, the chain organization for oils and fats. CSR assumes 3800 kg of palm oil per hectare.


HOW DO WE GET TO 2 MILLION SQUARE METRES OF PLANTATION?

You may be thinking, how do they come up with so many square metres of palm oil plantation that they make redundant? That's a fun question. Do the math. We take the number of products times the percentage of palm oil in those products and that gives a number of kilos of palm oil saved. If you then divide that by the average yield per square metre of a plantation, you arrive at the number of metres of plantation we save. Very simple really. Of course, you can say that there is less palm oil yield or that a plantation produces every year. That affects the outcome up and down. But our concern is not so much about the exact number of metres but t he fact that we have an effect on the growth of unsustainable palm oil plantations and thus we hope to reduce worldwide deforestation and thus pressure on the rainforest. Get it?

The orangutans are happy with The Flower Farm!

The orangutans are happy with The Flower Farm! We support the initiatives of Orangutan Rescue, a Dutch non-profit organisation with a fantastic team dedicated to relocating endangered orangutans to a safe area of rainforest.

Go to

Orangutanrescue.nl

100% plant-based spread for baking, frying and spreading, made the same way you can make it at home. It contains shea butter instead of palm oil.



It is a magnificent score: 9.2.

So your next question is of course: how does the scoring work? Based on 14,958 votes (after verification/deduplication) on 63 products, a rating of 1 to 5 was converted to the corresponding report point and an average number of stars.The result is a range of satisfactory, unsatisfactory and outlier products above the 8.0 average. A score of 9.2 is exceptionally high. The research was carried out on behalf of Food Personality.

COOKING, BAKING, ROASTING WITHOUT PALM OIL.
Available in a 200g wrap.

Ingredients: vegetable oils and fats (sunflower oil 52%, shea butter 30%, rapeseed oil 15%, fully hydrogenated rapeseed oil 3%), water, sea salt, carrot juice. Emulsifiers: mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, sunflower lecithin, lemon juice, natural flavor, vitamins: A, D2.

SPREAD WITHOUT PALM OIL

Available in a 450 g tub.

Ingredients: vegetable oils and fats (sunflower oil (62%), shea butter (38%)), water, carrot juice, sea salt, emulsifier: mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, lemon juice, natural flavouring, vitamins: A, D.

The Flower Farm is available in almost all Dutch supermarkets. Can’t find it in the refrigerated section? Ask the supermarket manager, because maybe you shop at a store that has not (yet) included it in its range.

Click on the logos to go to the supermarkets’ websites.

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