ABSTRACT
After the Second World War a sea-change occurred in the world market for palm oil. The United States, previously the main consumer of highquality oil, now bought very little. During the wartime era of scarce and costly palm oil supplies, American soap and compound lard manufacturers had found new ways of processing other oils and fats to meet their needs; and after the war, synthetic detergents began to attack the conventional soap industry at its very roots. Malaysian palm oil producers had to look elsewhere, and to work increasingly hard at creating market opportunities, as their own output began to soar in the 1960s. Many looked to the rapidly expanding food-processing and catering industries of Western Europe. These offered the prospect of fresh uses and new customers for palm oil, if only it could be transformed beyond recognition from its natural state. In the 1990s deeply coloured, strongly flavoured vegetable oils began to acquire a positive value among cooks eager for exotic treats, but in the 1960s food manufacturers viewed such characteristics with caution. Vegetable oils were attractive because they were cheap, but in order to become effective substitutes for butter and lard they had to be refined into a bland, pale form: a blank canvas upon which manufacturers could create the desired impression. Developments in refining techniques therefore proceeded apace during the 1950s and 1960s, and palm oil producers gradually became aware that quality improvements were needed within their mills, too, in order to produce new grades of palm oil tailored to the refiners’ requirements. Palm oil had a great future as an invisible ingredient, used in a wide range of products ranging from margarine through biscuits and crisps to ice cream. Yet in order to realize this dream, planters and engineers had to pursue the quest for quality at low
cost more vigorously than ever before. As shown in the previous chapter, Bek-Nielsen was well placed to do so, and although much of the pioneering research in this area was done outside United Plantations, he was so quick to adopt innovations and so keen to develop them further that his firm’s name eventually became synonymous with quality at the highest level.1
