Cargill Says US Can’t Replace Seed Oils Due to Supply Limits

(Bloomberg) — Cargill Inc. said the US food industry can’t fully replace seed oils as there aren’t enough alternatives in the market.

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The world’s largest commodities trader said the best substitutes for things like soybean and canola oil make up just a fraction of the total volumes needed by the industry. Science supports the health benefits of oilseeds, said Florian Schattenmann, Cargill’s chief technology officer.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been pitching beef fat as a healthier replacement for seed oils. He has drawn a link between today’s obesity epidemic and the move away from tallow in the 1990s. His call to “make frying oil tallow again” has created more demand uncertainty for crop farmers already struggling with President Donald Trump’s tariff wars that have roiled markets.

“The next best alternatives together are like 5% of the total volumes,” Schattenmann said in an interview last week. “We do not see those sentiments in Europe, for instance, which is not less health-conscious than the US in many ways. So whenever something is only contained to a certain country, that makes you wonder, is that science or is this more emotional?”

Seed oils make up most of the world’s edible-oil supply that also includes oils from palm, coconut, tallow, lard, olive and avocado. “None of these sources, with the exception of palm oil, has the size and scale to meet current global consumer demand,” Cargill said in a statement, adding that seed-oil production is 20 times larger than edible-oil alternatives.

Cargill, one of the biggest oilseed processors that counts as the C in the quartet of global crop traders known as the ABCDs, supplies both seed oils and tallow to companies around the world. Schattenmann said he is a scientist and therefore couldn’t comment on the country’s political decisions.

In December, 1.2 billion pounds of soybean oil was refined for edible use in the US, compared to only 75.6 million pounds of edible tallow, according to USDA data.

“It’s more like, there’s no alternative at scale, so let’s make sure the science gets proliferated in the right way,” Schattenmann said at Cargill’s innovation lab in Fort Collins, Colorado, where the company is studying crops including canola, corn, sunflowers, camelina and stevia.