“Which Oil?” Doesn't Matter Much. “How Much?” Does.
We studied two decades of cooking oil ads and labels on the shelf. The same playbook of misdirection runs through most of food marketing.
Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.
Editor’s note: Today’s piece is from Anushka Mukherjee, Charul Bhakre and I, Samarth.
The three of us have been obsessing over cooking oils and marketing over the last few weeks and the head-banging on Slack channel made us write this piece—to show you the logic of the marketing machinery, and to make an argument for reclaiming your agency by setting the questions yourself, rather than letting the marketer do it for you.
(All ads and claims are from actual brands. But we are not naming specific brands here because this is a category-wide playbook.)
— Samarth Bansal (samarth@thewholetruthfoods.com)
We started researching oils because we were obsessed with a claim found in edible oil marketing: a cholesterol-free sunflower oil.
This is true. Sunflower oil has no cholesterol. But neither does mustard oil or palm oil. Or any oil on the vegetable oil shelf.
Because cholesterol comes from animals, and vegetable oils come from, well, plants. So obviously, every vegetable oil is cholesterol-free. (Just like salt is sugar-free.)
A charitable interpretation would call this a “grey area”: the marketer didn’t lie, because the claim is defensibly true. And yet it feels misleading. The claim makes the oil sound healthy, and it works precisely because most consumers don’t know that all vegetable oils are cholesterol-free.
Which made us wonder: what else is going on in edible oil marketing? What claims are brands making? What matters and what doesn’t?
So we studied ads from oil brands across two decades and read labels across the shelf. It revealed patterns about food marketing that hold lessons for more than just oil.
Imagine you’re the brand manager at an oil brand. How do you grow your business? Two ways.
One, expand the category (sell more oil).
Two, grow market share (sell yours over your competitor’s by showing yours is better).
This applies to most categories. No problem.
But through the lens of the consumer, there is a problem. Because the first lever—selling more oil—goes against our interests. Indians are already consuming far too much oil.
Look at the data: the average Indian consumes around 23 kg of edible oil a year, which is double the ICMR ceiling of 12 kg, and triple what we consumed in 2001. This includes everything from packaged food to outside food to homemade food.
Which means that if consumer health is the concern, ideally you shouldn’t be encouraging oil consumption at all. (But brands do, and we’ll come to that.)
So what else can you do?
You can double down on the second lever and show how your oil is better than your competitor’s.
But the truth is, oil is a commodity. Just like we wrote in the article on eggs, for commodities the most boring things are the ones that matter the most. With oil, what we really need to know is that the bottle contains exactly what it claims and isn’t adulterated. That’s the most crucial thing a brand should guarantee. And don’t get us wrong: this is a real value add in modern times, when supply chains are longer and trust is scarce. But “we sell honest oil” isn’t exactly the most exciting brief.
So this is the conundrum: the brand manager’s job is to sell more of a thing the consumer should consume less of, and to win in the market, you have to manufacture reasons to pick yours over theirs when the differentiation isn’t significant enough.
Every oil ad you’ve seen is solving this problem. The result is an ad ecosystem bombarded with claims that distort the conversation we actually need to be having about oil—that we are consuming too much of it, and that we need a serious awareness push to bring that down.
How does it distort? Let us walk you through two categories of claims mapping to the two growth incentives that cooking oil marketing keeps promoting.
First: claims that manufacture permission to consume more.
This is best illustrated through the stories shown in ads. Two examples.
— A schoolgirl is backstage. She is getting ready for her dance performance. But her tiffin is packed with samosas and puris. A teacher spots it and inquires if she plans to eat all of this right now, right before the performance. The young girl, very excitedly, says yes, because it’s made in sunflower oil, which is very light (emphasis added). She eats, and dances, with full energy and a big smile.
— A wife is concerned as her husband reaches for another samosa during a cricket match. She knows she can’t stop him, so she has stopped trying. But she still cares. And she’s found a solution: the oil she now uses absorbs less of it. Which makes the fried snacking she was worried about feel like less of a problem.
Your “light” oil or “low-absorbing” oil is not solving the problem. If anything, it misdirects. It quietly changes the frame of the problem.
Because, for a moment, assume these are actually better oils. Even then, a better oil only helps when you are replacing an oil high in saturated fat with one high in unsaturated fat (MUFA/PUFA).
Replacement. That’s the key word—and the benefit. It only helps when the better oil is swapped in for the worse one.
Because the lever that actually matters—the one that matters most for your health—is how much oil you consume. The quantity. And no frying technology or supposed lightness solves for that.
Second: claims that manufacture false differentiation.
This one serves the “expand market share” function by claiming to be different from the bottle next to it (when it mostly isn’t). Two examples.
— A mother acknowledges that it’s difficult to keep children away from their favourite fried food like samosas and fries. So don’t try, the ad suggests. Just cook it in an immunity-boosting oil with vitamins and antioxidants.
— Oils that claim to have antioxidants. And they do, so they must be good for you, because antioxidants are. This is mostly a packaging claim.
But the label won’t tell you the commercial reality: those antioxidants are primarily working to stop the oil from going rancid on the retail shelf. They are there to protect the oil’s lifespan, not yours. And btw, high heat actually destroys a lot of these antioxidants anyway.
The edible oil shelf is packed with such claims: from helping you manage diabetes to meeting your micronutrient requirements. But seriously: why are we attaching micronutrient stories to a fat-rich product at all?
So see these claims for what they are: marginal differences—which may or may not be true—amped up to suggest X is meaningfully better than Y, when it matters far less than the real estate and air time the marketer wants you to give it.
These are four of the many examples we found that revealed a clear pattern in this category—and in food marketing in general.
First, raise an anxiety: your food is heavy, your children won’t stop eating fried things, your immunity needs help.
Then, sell the cure: this oil is light, this one absorbs less, this one has antioxidants.
That’s the machine. And once you see it, the first question to ask is to notice the setup—whether the anxiety the cure is solving is a real one, and then if the proposed cure is actually the right one.
Because the setup reflects the debate the brand wants you to have—which oil is healthiest—and as long as that’s the dominant debate for consumers, there is no bad answer for any brand. As long as you’re arguing about which oil, there is always a cure for whatever worries you.
The unseen casualty is the question that actually deserves the attention: how much.
Because that’s the main lever. It’s worth repeating: we are consuming double the ICMR ceiling, and triple what we ate in 2001.
So the questions that matter are the ones that the marketer won’t nudge you towards: are all your home dishes dependent on oil-based cooking? Could one of them be prepped a different way? Do you know how many teaspoons of oil go into a serving? When did you last measure, with intention, what your everyday consumption actually looks like? What are the hidden sources of oil?
A brand whose first job is to sell more oil cannot also be the one telling you to use less. Except, occasionally, it has to, because the law mandates it.
Any oil ad making a “heart-healthy” claim—and a surprising number do—carries a disclaimer in tiny font: that heart health depends on exercise, less saturated fat, a balanced diet, and… less oil.
Yes, it’s right there: the same ad giving you permission to have more is telling you that using less is better. Only one of them can be true.
Now, don’t get us wrong.
First, we are not saying oil choice is meaningless. Our previous article has a full deep-dive and framework on how to choose the right cooking oil. The point we’re emphasising here is where you focus, and what has more impact.
And second, we are not making an argument for a joyless plate. You don’t have to give up pakodas with chai when it’s raining, and for one of us, his mother’s chole bhature is not up for negotiation (not changing!).
The point is not to stop eating the food that brings us joy. The point is to notice and be aware—to choose how much, and when—instead of being sold the idea that you can eat freely because the oil will handle it all.
Because that idea is really just a way of telling you that you can’t moderate your own eating, so the brand will step in and do it for you another way. Don’t fall for it.
You have agency. And at a time when food marketing dominates so much of what we see, reclaiming that agency starts with asking the right questions, and then deciding how much and what you consume in your context. For your health. Not for the brand manager’s KPIs.
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Good Information.
Well researched and informative!