In February, I visited the site of the Singapore titan Yihai Kerry’s facility in Shanghai as part of a seminar focused on the food supply chain.

The site, located near the port, is of epic proportions.

The site provides strategic supplies of food oils and distributes a range of cooking oils across the metropolis and was one of the main providers of cooking oil during the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai.

Our tour required a bus and multiple stops and reminded me of the scale required in providing key components in the diet.

Biosecurity

One of the key parts of the presentation was around the strict biosecurity and requirements for vehicles entering and exiting the facility and the extensive measures taken to ensure food safety around its blockbuster brand, Golden Dragonfish soybean oil.

My take-home leaving that space was that cooking oils in China seemed to be really well monitored.

Last week, my perception and countless others was also rocked by another scandal featuring this very same brand (Yihai Kerry denies that its supplies are affected).

Cooking oil is an area which has often been prone to scandal. Stomach curdling exposés have taken place over the past decade where “gutter oil” has been reprocessed after being used in restaurants.

Recycled oil

Gutter oil, or recycled oil, tends to be high in aflatoxins and can be highly dangerous for human consumption. Indeed, in response to consumer concerns around gutter oil, the government and the restaurant supply chain have taken a wide array of measures to assure people around food safety.

While restaurants can always pose some risk, Chinese people tend to have fairly strong trust in the main brands of cooking oil.

Cooking at home is where people feel most secure and, when budgets allow, people tend to purchase from brands where trust exists.

Golden Dragonfish has been a trusted brand.

Trust was broken dramatically when it emerged recently that tankers transporting oil didn’t comply with disinfecting regulations and it is likely that long-distance oil tankers were being refilled with edible oil, creating huge risks around contamination.

This apparently has been an open secret for some time, according to media reporting.

To put this in context, it reportedly costs the middleman responsible for transport of oils approximately €120 to disinfect a tanker.

The application where tankers and logistic routes can be tracked was potentially a key source of information for sleuths attempting to understand the scale of the risk

However, with lower prices and squeezed margins, it seems that transporters have been taking liberties and skipping the disinfection and it seems that this fell into a grey zone in the regulations and no organisation was specifically responsible for checking whether this has been done.

While this news was first reported by State media, an app which can be used to check the transport routes of oils, has been disabled – apparently in an attempt to reduce the impact of the scandal.

The application where tankers and logistic routes can be tracked was potentially a key source of information for sleuths attempting to understand the scale of the risk.

Data is powerful in helping to build trust and now in the absence of data, the scandal will continue to brew.

Staple

Chinese consumers are shocked by this news but given that cooking oil is such a staple in the diet, few options remain but for consumers to place their trust in a different brand and hope that the industry can recover its trust.

For me, I am sticking to imported cooking oils for the time being.