AAK (AarhusKarlshamn AB)
THE parent company, AarhusKarlshamn AB, is a Swedish registered joint-stock company based in Malmö. The Company’s shares are officially listed on the OMX Nordic Exchange, Stockholm, in the Mid Cap segment, Consumer Commodities sector.
AAK proudly proclaims itself as the world’s leading manufacturer of high value-added speciality vegetable oils used by the food, chocolate, confectionary and cosmetics industries, and as ingredients in animal feeds.
AAK is a founder member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a discredited association of palm oil producers, distributors and users that acts to greenwash an industry that is causing massive amounts of deforestation and CO2 emissions.
On its website, AAK says its raw materials come from the plant kingdom and are renewable. What it does not say is that a lot of its raw materials come from Indonesia and Malaysia where swathes of natural forest are being stripped bare in the name of palm-oil cultivation.
AAK has production facilities in Denmark, Mexico, the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, Uruguay and the USA, and has procurement and sales offices around the world.
AAK manages to stay below the radar of environmentalists because because rather than retailing its products in supermarkets it mostly supplies caterers and manufacturers of retail products. Consequently AAK doesn’t have a high profile among the general public.
But the fact is AAK is a very big player when it comes to oil palm. For example, the Prep range of cooking oil, originally launched in the USA in the 1960’s and then launched in the UK in 1967 is now the leading edible oils brand. In the late 1990’s, Prep was launched in Germany and is now available across Europe from the west of Ireland to Russia.
Another of its brands is Whirl.
Health Issues
In addition to the undisputed effect that palm oil cultivation has on the environment, it has also been linked to bad cholesterol. According to Wikipedia, many health authorities state that palm oil promotes heart disease, citing research and metastudies that go back to 1970.
For many years now, it has been established that the primary cholesterol-elevating fatty acids are the saturated fatty acids with a concomitant increase in the risk of coronary heart disease.
The World Health Organization (WHO) states there is convincing evidence that palmitic oil consumption contributes to an increased risk of developing cardiovascular diseases.Research in the US and Europe supports the WHO report.
_________________________________________________________________