We didn’t use palm oil. Not even certified sustainable palm oil.
If you’ve spent any time in food retail you know what that means operationally. Palm oil is in everything — or something that might be palm oil is in everything, listed as an emulsifier, a stabiliser, a vegetable fat, a thing with a name that requires a QA manager on the phone to confirm. QA managers who will, more often than not, explain to you patiently that the product is certified. That you should be satisfied with that.
I was never satisfied with that.
Certified sustainable palm oil exists because an industry with a devastating environmental and human rights record needed a story to tell. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is that story. It is not nothing — but it is the floor the industry set for itself, and I didn’t see why that floor had to be mine.
So I built my own verification system. Which meant: every new product was a project. Every emulsifier was a question. Every supplier learned quickly that we were the annoying customer — the one who wouldn’t take the certificate and move on, who wanted to know what the ingredient actually was before it came anywhere near our shelves.
It cost us range. A lot of range. Every product also had to taste good, keep well, ship well, hold margin, and offer genuine value — and be palm oil free, and be free of slave labour in its supply chain. The overlap between “all of those things simultaneously” is smaller than you’d think.
Here is what I didn’t expect.
Holding that line meant other people who’d drawn the same line could find us. Customers who cared about elephants — really cared, not performatively — recognised what we were doing and stayed. Not because we marketed it loudly. Because it was structurally true, and people who are paying attention can tell the difference.
And the suppliers. The tiny single-product operations who’d also decided the certification wasn’t enough, who were doing the hard unglamorous work of actually solving the problem rather than narrating it. We found each other because we were both being awkward in the same direction. Those relationships had more depth than any of the conventional supplier partnerships. We were on the same side of the same line.
The standard exists to make the industry comfortable. You don’t have to be comfortable with it.
When you draw your own line and hold it — actually hold it, operationally, at cost — you become findable to the people who’ve drawn the same one.