April 28, 2005

It's been a month of change at the homegrown cookie factory. It may look and smell pretty much the same, that dough being pressed into cookies and rolling along conveyer belts. But a fundamental ingredient in Voortman cookies is being cut.

Its replacement sits in plastic tubs in the quality control manager's office, among the paperwork and bags of cookie samples.

Creamy, snow-white, firm yet yielding to the touch, the substance in the tub resembles a spreadable margarine.

You could label it one of the new generation of oils. It's a vegetable-based blend, a liquid turned solid at room temperature without requiring hydrogenation. That means it's free of trans fatty acids -- the fat that's been called a silent killer.

Trans fat is created when vegetable oils are heated and blasted with hydrogen to turn them semi-solid at room temperature. Researchers say the fat created by this increases your bad cholesterol and decreases the good.

Studies show eating just one gram of trans fat increases a person's risk of heart disease by 20 per cent. Canadians eat, on average, eight to 10 grams a day.

They eat them in cookies and crackers, in fried foods and chips, in frozen waffles and microwave popcorn. In short, in many of the processed foods common in Canadian diets.

Voortman is just one of many companies cutting the trans fat, replacing partially hydrogenated oils with trans-free substitutes. It's now baking its cookies with a new blend of vegetable oils.

This is more than just changing an ingredient in a cookie recipe, more than just switching to another fat in the long line of fats that's gone before. It signals a shift in the processed foods industry, a change in thinking brought on by public pressure and consumer demand.

In this new culture, it makes perfect business sense that a company selling you Chunky Chip and Peanut Delight cookies can also be worried about your health.

Voortman president Harry Voortman feels strongly about trans fat and about being the first cookie company to drop it. The company announced last November it planned to produce trans fat-free cookies and has invested more than $1 million in the change.

While cutting the trans fat from their cookie lines, they also set out to decrease the amount of saturated fat.

That means that under the Canadian government's new regulations, the company could place a label reading "Zero grams trans fats!" on the front of their cookie packages.

With all the recent publicity on trans fat, consumers are finally learning what scientists have warned about for years. Foods labelled "zero trans" or "free of trans" are becoming the new "no cholesterol" or "low-fat."

"Companies respond to what consumers want them to respond to. They're like politicians," said David Dunne, a marketing professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. "Nobody up until recently has been demanding anything about taking trans fats out."

Dunne said several factors have aligned to spark this health-conscious movement in the industry.

For one, the government is heeding the warnings about trans fat. For the first time, Health Canada will force companies to list the amount of trans fat in their products on the nutrition labels. The new rules take effect in 2006, but many companies have already complied.

Rising rates of obesity have prompted lawsuits against fast-food chains and food processors in the U.S.

"There's a demographic background to this, with baby boomers getting older and getting more concerned about issues of health," Dunne said. "All the media on trans fats has fallen on very receptive ears."

Health and nutrition are muscling into the territory of taste, which has long been the main concern in the processed food industry, Dunne said.

"If it starts hitting them in the bottom line, then they're going to be worried about it."

If not, they may be left behind in the rush of food production.

Cookies roll down the lines at the Voortman plant in the thousands. It produces some 20 million a day for Canadian and U.S. consumers.

On a recent midday shift, a last batch of chocolate chip cookies with partially hydrogenated oils -- and trans fat -- made its way through a robotic packaging machine.

At the same time, trans-free Tea Rings and Chunky Chip cookies, and vanilla and lemon wafers passed through the ovens on conveyer belts. Trans fat was good for the food manufacturing industry, good for "shelf stability." In other words, that cookie sitting in a package on the grocery store shelf would taste just as good and fresh months from now, thanks to its partially hydrogenated oils.

These semi-solid fats were the way to go, after the industry moved from animal fats, such as lard, to palm oils. Both were found to be high in saturated fat, which raises cholesterol levels.

Four years ago, the Voortman company first heard of trans fat. Harry Voortman's daughter, a naturopathic doctor, pointed out the health risks. The company decided to drop the trans, and set out a year ago to find an alternative to hydrogenation.

The company wasn't concerned about shortening their cookies' shelf life. Their products are turned over on store shelves from nine to 16 weeks from when they're baked.

Their problem was: How do you switch to another fat without the saturated fat in the cookie skyrocketing?

Palm oils and animal fats were out. So were vegetable oils such as soybean or canola in their natural liquid state.

That's because cookie recipes sometimes ask you to start by creaming or blending the fat and sugar together to create an airy mixture that will lighten the finished product. It's the same even on a large scale. But soybean or canola oils won't cream, said quality control manager John Bol. They also make for a greasy cookie.

They're lower in saturated fat, though, one of the company's goals in ridding their cookies of trans fat.

"We were told by the oil companies you could not make cookies with a vegetable oil that's not hydrogenated," said vice-president Adrian Voortman, Harry Voortman's son.

So they went to a chemist who helped them develop a blend of vegetable oils that would turn into a soft solid at room temperature -- without hydrogenation.

It's accomplished in a tall, cylindrical machine called a votator or heat exchanger. The machine basically takes the blend of oils, throws some heat and air and whipping action at it, and what emerges is the creamy white margarine-like substance sitting in tubs in Bol's office.

The ingredient panels on Voortman's new cookies now list "vegetable oil," with the blend in brackets beside. It's mostly canola and soybean, plus modified palm and palm kernel and sunflower oils, said Adrian Voortman.

Once they had the blend of oils right, they had to see how it held up in Voortman's roughly 40 types of cookies. "It's trial and error," Bol said. "There's a lot of testing."

It turns out their experienced palates found that the cookies with the new blend taste better than the old ones.

Adrian said hydrogenated fats leave a waxy taste.

The new blend has a lower melting point, so it breaks down faster in your mouth.

"We've been able to lower saturated fats as well, and make the product taste a lot better," Adrian said. "It has a cleaner taste." The wafer recipes switched first because it was tricky getting the fat the right consistency for the cream filling.

In March, the other cookie lines went trans-fat-free, although some products haven't switched yet because new packaging isn't in. This month, the sugar-free line becomes trans-fat-free, too.

In the meantime, the Canadian government is making all food processors confess their trans-fat content. Every week, it seems, another company announces it's dropped the trans in its products -- Goldfish crackers, New York Fries, Frito Lay chips, Pizza Pizza.

New Democrat MP Pat Martin introduced a private member's bill in February urging the government to ban trans fat in processed foods. All the buzz is a long time coming for researchers like Bruce Holub, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Guelph. He said he was on a committee 25 years ago that advised the government to be concerned about trans fat in margarine.

Now companies are racing each other to get the trans out, or risk losing sales.

"Once you have to declare it on the food label, that's a great incentive to get it down or out," Holub said.

That may come at the expense of increasing the amount of saturated fat. And some people may see "zero trans fat" labels on products and assume they're healthier. A cookie, in the end, is still a cookie.

Holub suggests a user-friendly alternative -- label products with a scale or colour code according to their ability to lower or increase a person's risk of heart disease.

"What's the bottom line? The bottom line is the heart-disease risk of the fat in that product," he said. "Then those heart disease-promoting products won't survive in the marketplace, and public health and the public good will be served."

It makes you wonder what scientists will find lurking in the next aisle, the next health threat, and how long it will take to close the gap between what science shows and what the public knows.

When food processors used partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, they could slap "low in saturated fat" labels on their products, even though they contained that hidden fat, trans.

"They thought this was going to be better," said Dr. David Jenkins, of the University of Toronto's department of nutritional sciences and St. Michael's Hospital.

"Now they're being told that this is not a good idea."

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Fats Glossary

* Saturated fat comes from animal products and some vegetable sources. It raises the body's good and bad cholesterol levels.

* Trans fat is created when liquid vegetable oils and hydrogen are heated, creating a semi-solid fat, such as margarine, called a partially hydrogenated oil. Trans fat increases bad cholesterol and decreases good cholesterol levels.

* Unsaturated fat, whether polyunsaturated or monounsaturated, comes from plant sources and raises good cholesterol while lowering bad cholesterol levels.