Stratas Foods has unveiled its newly developed Flex-Palm line of palm shortenings. Stratas scientists recently presented their new generation of palm shortenings which perform like traditional soybean-based shortenings. Like all palm shortenings, Flex Palm shortening is trans-fat free.
The proprietary Flex Palm process was developed in the Stratas Foods Research and Innovation Center, allowing for the zero trans-fat palm oil to function more like partially hydrogenated shortenings – more like soybean.
“We, like everyone in the industry, were not happy with products available for our customers in the post trans-fat era,” said Roger Daniels, Vice President, Research, Development and Innovation for Stratas Foods. “So we challenged our scientists in our Research, Development & Innovation Center to achieve function following form. Specifically, if we made palm oil shortenings look and feel like real (soybean-based partially hydrogenated) shortenings, the expectation is that they would function like them too. The result is Flex Palm, a drop-in solution that really works. This is beyond a partial solution for problems of palm; it is a full solution.”
As Daniels explained, through market testing it was determined that regular palm shortenings suffer from “seven deadly sins” when it comes to performance and consistency. Flex Palm outperforms or mitigates functional palm challenges. The most sited issues with regular palm shortenings are:
- Poor performance under sheer (poor yield).
- Long mix times, often never reaching peak.
- Lumps and clumps in dough.
- Cracks and tears in dough.
- Cracks in icing.
- Unacceptable freeze, thaw and shelf life issues.
- Higher saturated fats.
Flex Palm produced shortenings have desirable attributes such as:
- A smooth, creamy, more pliable consistency that rival soybean-based products from the past.
- Palm shortenings that are easier to work with throughout the process of creating cakes and icings.
- A whiter appearance due to smaller average crystal particle distribution.
- A wider working functional range based on product temperature.
- More consistent texture from cube-to-cube and lot-to-lot.
- Desirable textural properties maintained over a longer portion of the declared shelf life, extending the period of usefulness.
Stratas Foods will offer non-emulsified and emulsified Flex Palm shortenings to meet the functional shortening needs of food processors.
About Stratas Foods:Stratas Foods LLC is the leading supplier of fats and oils to the Foodservice, Food Ingredients and Retail Private Label markets in North America. Stratas benefits from more than 200 years of combined experience in the fats & oils industry, which is evident in the refurbished Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Center. The RDI Center enables Stratas' team of scientists to develop, test, and prototype a wide range of innovative oil products in state-of-the-art labs and pilot plant facilities. With production facilities in Illinois, California and Georgia, and distribution centers across the U.S. and Canada, Stratas Foods is well positioned to meet the needs of its customers. Stratas Foods is committed to producing the highest quality food products at a competitive price, while providing industry-leading transportation, distribution, and customer service resources. For more information about Stratas Foods, visitwww.stratasfoods.com.
