Updated on 12 December 2024 by Yeo Yu Teng

What Are Specialty Fats | Why Do Manufacturers Use Specialty Fats | Key Applications of Specialty Fats | Production of Specialty Fats from Oil Palm Plantations

What do chocolates, ice cream, and milk have in common? Besides having a smooth, velvety texture, they often contain specialty fats – the secret ingredients that adds to their luxurious creaminess.

Think of the way chocolate truffles melt in your mouth or the rich feeling of your favorite frozen treats. These versatile fats are used across food industries worldwide, enhancing the quality and experience of everything from baked goods to confectionery. Let’s dive into the fascinating world of specialty fats, explore how they’re used, and uncover how they’re made.

What Are Specialty Fats

Specialty fats are versatile types of fats that food manufacturers use to replace more expensive or harder-to-source fats like cocoa butter, butter, or milk fats. Some common types of specialty fats include:

• Cocoa butter equivalents (CBE)
• Cocoa butter replacers (CBR)
• Cocoa butter substitutes (CBS)
• Cocoa butter improvers (CBI)
• Milk fat replacers (MFR)
• Other specialty fats

At the molecular level, specialty fats are made up of triglycerides, molecules composed of a glycerol backbone, and three fatty acid chains. The type of fatty acid chains—like oleic, linoleic, and palmitic acids—determines the fat’s physical properties, such as its melting point, appearance, and stability. These factors influence how the fat behaves in food products, affecting texture, structure, and quality.

Imagine triglycerides as dolls, where the glycerol is the body, and the fatty acids are the interchangeable outfits. The glycerol “body” stays the same, but you can change the fatty acid “clothes” to alter the doll’s appearance and function. Just like you might wear a tuxedo for a wedding or a swimsuit for a beach party, mixing and matching different fatty acids allows you to create custom “outfits” for different purposes. This flexibility makes specialty fats incredibly valuable in the food industry, allowing manufacturers to create custom solutions for different culinary needs.

Why Do Manufacturers Use Specialty Fats

The global market for specialty fats and oils is set to grow from USD 54.81 billion in 2024 to USD 82.1 billion by 2033 [1]. So, what’s driving this demand, and why are food manufacturers using specialty fats?

Improved Functionality

The growing demand for specialty fats is closely tied to the booming market for ready-to-eat (RTE) foods, which is projected to grow from USD 402.90 billion in 2024 to USD 512.74 billion by 2029 [2]. As our lives get busier, more people are turning to convenient RTE foods to save time on grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Specialty fats are essential in this trend, as they not only extend the shelf life of these products but also enhance their texture and flavor, making these convenient meals more enjoyable and reliable.

Specialty fats provide solutions to common challenges in food production. Take chocolate, for example. Regular chocolates can easily melt in warm climates, but adding specialty fats enhances their heat resistance, allowing them to be shipped to hotter regions without melting.

Additionally, specialty fats simplify production processes. For instance, producing high-quality chocolate traditionally involves tempering—a time-consuming process of repeatedly heating and cooling the chocolate to achieve that perfect glossy finish and satisfying snap. By using specialty fats, manufacturers can skip tempering altogether, delivering the same premium quality while speeding up production.

Cost-savings

Cocoa butter, a key ingredient in chocolate, can be expensive due to fluctuating production and quality differences based on the reason and season. Cocoa butter from South America, for example, tends to be softer than that from Malaysia, leading manufacturers to prefer specific sources to maintain a consistent quality in their products. As demand for high-quality cocoa butter rises, so do costs.

To help chocolate makers manage costs, specialty fats have stepped in as an economical alternative. These specialty fats, which include cocoa butter substitutes and equivalents, replicate the properties of cocoa butter but come at a lower price. This makes them a practical choice for maintaining quality while keeping expenses in check.

Key Applications of Specialty Fats

Specialty fats are used across many industries, including chocolate and compound coatings, confectionery, bakery, dairy, and frying.

Chocolate and Compound Coating

Palm-based cocoa butter alternatives stay solid at room temperature but begin melting around body temperature, providing that delightful melt-in-your-mouth experience while ensuring stability in warmer climates. These alternatives are not only cost-effective but also versatile, with customizable melting properties for applications like chocolate molding and coatings.

An added benefit is that palm-based alternatives avoid the issue of fat bloom, where cocoa butter can sometimes crystallize, leaving a white, powdery appearance. While safe to eat, this bloom can make chocolates look unappetizing. Palm-based specialty fats provide stability, keeping chocolates looking and tasting great.

Confectionery

Specialty fats are essential in shaping the taste, texture, and overall quality of confectionery products like fat-based spreads and candies. These fats ensure that flavors are released evenly as the fat melts in your mouth, making for a more enjoyable experience.

Another key benefit of specialty fats is their resistance to rancidity, which is when fats break down and develop unpleasant tastes and smells. This higher oxidative stability helps prolong the shelf life of confectionery products by preventing these unwanted changes.

Bakery

Specialty fats used in baking, such as all-purpose bakery shortenings, are essential for a wide range of baked goods, including cakes, pastries, bread, pizza, and even fried donuts. These fats make it easier for bread manufacturers to handle the dough. For instance, when added to bread dough, they make the dough less sticky, which helps prevent it from clinging to conveyor belts during production.

Additionally, they improve the dough’s elasticity, allowing it to trap gases and expand properly during proofing and baking – resulting in that light, airy, and springy texture we all love in freshly baked bread.

Dairy

Dairy manufacturers can use palm-based specialty fats to replace dairy fat entirely or just in part. Specialty fats replicate the texture and mouthfeel of dairy fat, which makes them a cost-effective alternative for many dairy products. They help keep whipped creams stable, airy, and well-textured, and they give ice cream that perfectly creamy consistency.

Additionally, palm oil-based specialty fats are excellent for plant-based and non-dairy products, catering to a range of dietary preferences.

Frying

Palm-based specialty fats are perfect for a variety of frying tasks, whether you’re making french fries, donuts, or instant noodles, or even handling heavy-duty frying like cooking meat. Their high smoking point allows them to cook at elevated temperatures without breaking down.

Thanks to their balanced mix of saturated and unsaturated fats, palm oil offers excellent oxidative stability, meaning it resists spoilage and helps extend the shelf life of fried foods. Since palm oil is naturally solid at room temperature, it also avoids trans fats typically found in hydrogenated oils.

Production of Specialty Fats from Oil Palm Plantations

Specialty fats can be made from palm oil, a vegetable oil derived from the fruits of oil palms. The process begins by harvesting the fruit and sending it to mills, where the flesh is pressed to produce Crude Palm Oil (CPO), and the seeds are crushed to create Crude Palm Kernel Oil (CPKO).

Refining Crude Palm Oil

Next, we refine crude palm oil (CPO) to produce refined, bleached, and deodorized (RBD) palm oil. Fats naturally consist of different triglycerides, each melting at a different temperature. As a result, at room temperature (25–30°C), the oil contains both liquid and solid portions. To manage this, we use a process called fractionation, which separates the oil into its liquid and solid components.

The liquid component, RBD palm olein, is rich in monounsaturated oleic acid (39–45%) and is widely used as cooking oil or in margarine, especially in tropical and subtropical regions.

The solid part, RBD palm stearin, has a higher concentration of saturated palmitic acid (50–68%) and is used in products such as margarine hardstock and candles.

Fractionation also yields RBD Palm Mid Fraction (RBDPMF), which undergoes further processing to become Cocoa Butter Equivalent (CBE), a key ingredient in chocolates and coatings.

Refining Crude Palm Kernel Oil

Similar to crude palm oil (CPO), crude palm kernel oil (CPKO) undergoes fractionation to separate its liquid and solid components before being refined. The liquid portion, called RBD palm kernel olein, can be hydrogenated and is commonly used in compound chocolates, giving them the right texture and stability.

The solid part, known as RBD palm kernel stearin, has a variety of applications. It’s often used in chocolate coatings for ice creams, giving the coating a smooth, firm finish. Additionally, RBD palm kernel stearin can be hydrogenated for use in non-dairy products like coffee whiteners and whipped creams. It’s also a key ingredient in compound chocolates and coatings for products like wafers, providing the right consistency and melting behavior.

Customizing Specialty Fats

If you want to make ice cream that melts more slowly on a hot day, you can increase the melting point of specialty fats and add them during the formulation. This raises the overall melting point of the ice cream, allowing it to withstand higher temperatures before it starts to melt.

As you might recall, the types of fatty acids and their positions within the specialty fat influence its physical properties. We can adjust these properties for different applications through processes like hydrogenation, interesterification, fractionation, and blending.

Hydrogenation, for example, turns liquid oils into fats that are more stable and likely to stay solid at room temperature. This process involves adding hydrogen atoms to the triglyceride molecules. Because partial hydrogenation creates unhealthy trans fats, we use full hydrogenation, which doesn’t produce trans fats in our products.

Interesterification rearranges the fatty acids within triglycerides to modify their physical properties. Fractionation, on the other hand, helps us create fats and oils with specific melting points. At our facilities, we use both chemical and enzymatic interesterification, as well as solvent and dry fractionation, to achieve the desired characteristics in our specialty fats.

References:

[1] https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/specialty-fats-and-oils-market.asp

[2] https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/ready-to-eat-food-market

[3] https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/trans-fat