Margarine: 100 years of technological and legal progress

Abstract

AbstractAll through its 100 year history, margarine has been a prime example of the technological progress that has been made in the food industry through the efforts of oil chemists, food technologists and nutritionists. Having been developed originally to fulfill a political need for an economically new source of food fat in France during the regime of Napoleon III, the product has been continually changed to provide improvements in flavor, storage stability and physical properties, as well as to satisfy new nutritional and dietary requirements. The Margarine Industry’s attainment of today’s high standards of quality, nutrition and convenience has also required a comparable legal effort to establish the product’s nutritional equivalence to butter, to remove restrictive legislation and to modify the Federal Standards of Identity in order to take advantage of technological advances. This paper attempts to assess some of the problems and changes currently facing the industry as a guide to what we might expect in the future.