This is an Oreo and this is Bruno.
Oreos have been around for more than 100 years and Bruno,
he's been a food scientist for 20 years.
The first thing that comes to mind to me is how convenient it is that they have this
flap and you can eat as many as you want.
And as a food scientist,
I usually always look at the label to see what they add to that product.
So today we're gonna break down the ingredients inside the Oreo cookie.
So the cream or the filling is a very interesting product development
challenge because uh it does not have any dairy product in it.
So they spell cream as C R E M E which is how we spell it in Portuguese.
By the way and the way that they achieve that uh texture,
the creaminess is by combining sugar with oils and soil acid.
So basically works as an emulsifier replacing the proteins from milk and eggs.
But Bruno will show you how it works.
Water and oil do not mix and because the density of oil is less
than the density of water,
when I combine them together,
we should be able to see the oil floating up to the surface.
That's where the soil Lesin comes into play.
So the idea is we should be able to add some Latin to this solution here
and make the oil stay longer in suspension in water
and the smaller the particles of oil that we can make the better.
And you can see that one thing that is already happening is that Latin also stabilizes
the air in suspension here.
That's why it's used to make ice cream.
For example,
there are three types of oil listed on the package,
but Bruno says the most important one might be palm oil.
The reason why palm oil and coconut oil for that matter are so important for the food industry today is
because it allows us to substitute animal fats that are solid at room
temperature with a vegetable fat.
The main reason Why we are somewhat resistant to using palm oil nowadays
is because of the agricultural practices around it.
Increased demand for palm oil has put rainforests at risk.
Oreo's parent company says it's taking steps to ensure it sustainably sources its palm oil with the
company accounting for about 0.5% of palm oil consumption.
Now for the sweetness that makes an Oreo well,
an Oreo.
If you use a high concentration of sugar and you don't use a very refined type of
sugar,
there will be some noticeable texture like graininess in the
product.
There are several types of sweeteners listed on the Oreo packages.
The Wall Street Journal purchased one of those types high fructose corn syrup.
One of these ingredients that revolutionize the industry.
There's a lot of enzymatic processes.
So we modify the starch from corn.
We break it down with an enzyme called ma ma S will convert the starch into
glucose.
But then we use another enzyme that modifies the glucose and converts that into
fructose and fructose is much more sweet than glucose.
One of the Oreo packages the Wall Street Journal bought listed invert sugar on its ingredients.
The FDA recognizes both ingredients as safe but recommends that consumers limit consumption
of all added sugars.
Oreo's parent company agrees there are some concerns about the fact that as
animals,
we are not used to be exposed to that amount of sweetness and we may eat
too much of the food just because it's sweeter.
It tastes so awesome.
Another aspect contributing to the cream's taste flavoring,
one package of Oreos listed natural flavor,
while the other listed artificial flavoring,
which is a broad term required by the FDA when a flavoring agent isn't coming from one of
these natural sources on its website,
Oreo specifically mentions vanilla commonly used to create the flavor of vanilla.
Now for the cookie,
Oreo declined to comment on which ingredients go in the cookie and which go in the filling because some of the
ingredients can be used in either or both.
It's a little difficult to break down the ingredients per part of the cookie.
But you can certainly say,
for example,
that wheat is certainly used for the cookie or the Wafer.
We know that wheat is the most significant component of this product because it is listed first in the
ingredients list.
The order of the ingredients is such that it reflects the proportion of the ingredients in
the product.
In this case,
it is enriched with several vitamins.
These ingredients,
for example,
is added folic acid,
which is a vitamin that is important to help prevent more formation of babies.
You can buy enriched flour in any grocery store that's widely available.
And they usually have exactly the same vitamins leavening agents also help the dough,
baking soda and or causing phosphate.
All these salts will release co two will release a gas
when they are heated in the product.
And that's what creates that fluffiness that as the product bakes and solidifies,
it becomes a crumbly and soft to the bite as for the
chocolate.
So we have chocolate mentioned later and we also have cocoa processed with alkali.
That means it was treated with an alkaline solution,
typically made with potassium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate.
And that's a common modification that is made with in cocoa beans to make them
taste uh uh more neutral,
so less acidic and also darkens the product a little bit.
So it looks like we covered all the ingredients here.
Oh and there is salt probably just a small amount of it because of course it is supposed to be
sweet.
And this reminds me of my grandma.
She always said that you always put a little bit of salt in sweet foods and a little bit of
sugar in savory food.
So shout out to grandma.
So this product is made stable by uh basically not having much water in it at
all by not having water,
you prevent microbial growth in spoilage.
There are a few things to note on the packaging.
It says that this product is made with bioengineered ingredients.
Bioengineering may sound scary but it's simply the replacement of genes
or pieces of the chromosome of the plant with others of interest.
For example,
you can copy the gene in one plant that is resistant to a pest and put that
into the soybeans and then you grow the soybeans and that plant might become resist into that
past before those products are used commercially and distributed as food
in the United States.
They have to be approved by several agencies and approved by the FDA as generally
recognized as safe or grass.
Oreo didn't comment on which specific ingredients are genetically modified.
Its parent company says the scientific consensus on the safety of genetically modified food ingredients is
clear and Bruno sees some opportunities for improvements.
The only question that I would have is why they still use soy.
Latin soy is an allergen.
So whenever possible,
we want to replace an allergenic ingredient with one that is not
allergenic.
There's only a few food products that have lasted for more than a century and oil is
one of them.
So whenever you are that food scientist making the decisions on what to change in the formulation,
you better know your stuff is upside down.
There's no way you can very interesting.