Fats and Oils: Synthetic Fat

While rising health concerns led companies to reformulate their cooking oils and spreads (for example, McDonald’s stopped using beef fat in its fryers, and Proctor and Gamble converted Puritan oil from a soybean blend to all canola oil), the holy grail of the American food industry was the creation of a fat that had all of its flavor and texture attributes but none of its calories. To this end, in 1991 A. E. Staley Manufacturing introduced Stellar, a corn-based product meant to replace oil in foods such as margarine and baked goods. The faux fat joined Simplesse, a dairy-derived product made by NutraSweet that had been developed to simulate high-fat flavor in frozen desserts.