Oils to Help Heal the Planet
By Lorrie Baumann
A new oil on the market allows consumers to delegate some of their concerns about climate change to La Tourangelle. The company has just released a new regeneratively-grown organic sunflower oil as well as the first non-GMO vegetable oil on the market that’s packaged in a bottle made of 100 percent recycled plastic.
“Our goal in making oils is to make delicious products that make cooking a better experience for consumers,” said Matthieu Kohlmeyer, La Tourangelle’s Chief Executive Officer. “Consumers in many ways are outsourcing their relationship to nature to us. Most consumers are living in an urban environment, and they don’t really know where their food is coming from. The role of a brand is to say, ‘You can take it easy; we’re taking care of it.’”
Kohlmeyer noted that consumer concern about the environment is becoming more mainstream, so when his company went looking for a new product to bring to the market, he wanted that to be oils that consumers could see as contributors to environmental conservation. He knew that farming has a direct impact on greenhouse gases and climate change, so he went to California to find farmers who were growing, in an environmentally responsible way, crops that could be turned into culinary oils. “It turns out that sunflower is a very good cooking oil, and it’s something that grows very well in California and in many places in the U.S.,” Kohlmeyer said. “We asked farmers if they were doing regenerative. We tried to find farmers that we could partner with to tell their story.”
In this first year of its production only a small amount of the regeneratively-grown sunflower oil is being made, but Kohlmeyer is hoping that this is a harbinger of the future of culinary oils. “This is 35 acres, and the goal is to bring to market an organic regenerative oil and start to tell a story of soil health and how it can fight climate change and make the soil more resilient,” he said. “We have to take the lead…. We’re giving consumers the power to vote for better agriculture.”
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La Tourangelle launched its Regenerative Organic Sunflower Oil pilot program with Scott Park of Park Farming Organics in Yolo County, California. Beginning in the spring of 2020, sunflower seeds for the oil were grown organically on land that has not had any chemical amendments in 20 years and that has benefited from regenerative practices such as crop rotation, cover cropping, composting and animal pasturing.
La Tourangelle is expanding the pilot program this year with an organic pumpkin seed oil, also in partnership with Park Farming Organics.
The new non-GMO oil, a blend of canola and sunflower oils, packaged in the 100 percent recycled plastic bottles, is intended as an everyday vegetable oil for consumers concerned about the proliferation of plastics in the environment but also desiring a more affordable option for their cooking oil. The company’s intention is to create a market for the recycled plastic bottles that will inspire other manufacturers to consider using more environmentally friendly recycled bottles in preference to bottles made from virgin plastic, even though the recycled plastic is more expensive than the virgin material, Kohlmeyer said.
While the regenerative sunflower oil is going into the natural foods channel, La Tourangelle is launching the non-GMO vegetable oil with large conventional grocers. “Organic is very much more expensive on the shelf,” he said. “You do have to think about the fact that to be inclusive, you have to be reachable…. You pay a buck more, but it is very reachable…. Everybody’s jumping on it because that’s what the world needs.”