Flaunting a Fat-Free Profile

By David Weldon

When McCain Foods made the decision to go totally transfat free by the end of this year, the announcement was no small potatoes.

In fact, it was huge potatoes. As the largest manufacturer of French fries in the world, McCain processes nearly one million pounds of potato products per hour. That is a lot of no fat.

And if it would seem to be a simple matter to no longer put something into a product, the challenge with producing totally trans fat free potato products is in the processing oil, not the potato itself.

It is a challenge that McCain has decided to meet head on, setting a very public date of Dec. 31 to have trans fats disappear from its lines, except in those cases where trans fats are in fact a natural part of the food. Even with the Dec. 31 deadline, the company vows to get it done earlier. And when McCain announced its decision this past winter, it began an aggressive marketing campaign to get the word out.

"By the end of 2007, and probably sooner, we will have removed trans fats from virtually all our products, with the only exceptions being those that have them naturally, such as some cheeses," explains Frank van Schaayk, CEO for McCain Foods USA, in Lisle, Ill.

McCain Foods international is headquartered in Florence, New Brunswick, Canada. But the Lisle, Ill. Headquarters has been kept plenty busy this year on the public relations front, as a growing number of U.S. communities ban their use in food preparation. That trend has sent huge ripples through the food industry, where the first step in eliminating trans fats begins