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Popular not only in summer: On average, every German ate 113 scoops of ice cream last year
Photo: Matthias Balk/ dpa
Langnese, Mövenpick, Häagen Dazs, Ben & Jerry's – the list of ice cream brands is long and the demand is high.
On average, every German ate 113 scoops of ice cream last year, according to calculations by the Federal Association of the German Confectionery Industry.
Almost 80 percent of this is bought from supermarkets.
But the ice cream from the shelf is often associated with enormous ecological and social problems.
This is the result of a study by the environmental foundation WWF.
For years, palm oil was an essential ingredient in ice cream: In order to create palm oil plantations, thousands of hectares of valuable tropical forest are cleared every year, especially in Indonesia, which accelerates climate change.
Many manufacturers are now using coconut oil - also known as coconut fat - as an alternative to the controversial palm oil.
But coconut oil, which is obtained from the dried nut meat of coconuts, is not a sustainable alternative either.
Overseas coconut oil
On the contrary.
The pressure from NGOs and consumers has had an effect and has reduced the proportion of palm oil in many products, says
Ilka Petersen,
palm oil expert at the WWF.
However, the proportion of coconut oil in ice cream has meanwhile increased by tenfold.
"And nobody asks about that," says Petersen.
Coconut fat is imported from overseas.
Like the oil palm, the coconut palm needs a tropical climate.
The coconut oil also comes from countries such as Indonesia, Brazil or the Philippines, where the rainforest is extensively cleared for production.
The area required for coconut palms is even higher than that for oil palms for palm oil production, because the yield of a coconut palm is smaller.
According to the WWF, the yield of the oil palm is around 3.3 tons of oil per hectare, while that of coconut palms is only around 0.7 tons of oil per hectare.
Around twelve million hectares worldwide are used to produce coconut oil.
But only about one percent of the global demand for vegetable oil can be covered with it.
According to the climate researcher Karsten Brandt, coconut oil is required
up to four times the energy and surface area of normal vegetable oil.
Even the controversial palm oil now has certification systems, but this is the exception with coconut oil.
There is also organic and fair trade coconut oil, but large manufacturers rarely use it.
Without regulation, manufacturers will continue to use uncertified coconut oil, Brandt fears.
Because in ice cream production, coconut oil, like palm oil, is above all a cheap substitute for whole milk and cream.
Milk fat is more expensive.
The large food manufacturers, who use coconut oil and palm oil as cheap raw materials in many products, are thus saving at the expense of the climate.
"Switching to coconut oil only solves the problem of the bad image for the manufacturer, since many consumers have the image of palm oil as a climate and rainforest killer," says Brandt.
Coconut oil, on the other hand, still sounds unsuspicious to many consumers, even though it is just as harmful to the climate as palm oil.
For food manufacturers who only want to improve their image without really solving the problem, the climate killer coconut oil is therefore still a cheap alternative.