I asked the man about his decision to use Soybean oil, and what type of soybean oil. Here is the response, and it makes allot of sense to me:
"First off, we try to maintain a very healthy product and when we began producing this product 12 years ago we originally looked into both Pure Soybean Oil and the option of Olive Oil.
So Olive Oil, one thing we quickly learned about Olive Oil was that it is not shelf stable when it contains food products. Also it over takes both flavor and any solids, so for example the product in your jar would become saturated and enlarged due to the absorption of the Olive Oil.
So Olive Oil is not something that should be used in these type of jarred pickle products. Olive Oil is very heavy and as mentioned above will overtake and saturate the vegetation but it would also quickly become rancid. Another thing is that it will make all the vegetables about twice the size and then when you were to pull out the product it would be saturated and extremely soft. People think Olive Oil should be used but they are not educated on storing pickled vegetables and they only thinking of putting olive oil on top of vegetables... therefore they think that it should be used to store vegetables in which makes a big difference. Lastly, some companies will say their product is stored in Olive Oil, but it is only used in about 1-5% of the oil make up and is a way of using the old bait and switch. Hope that helps a bit...
Our Soybean oil...as you can suspect there are many choices of Soybean oil from blended to hydrogenated to pure etc. We looked at each one and decided to go with the highest quality which is our Pure Soybean Oil. We also purchase our oil in futures to insure quality and consistency...also meaning it is not purchased on the open market. This is important as it not only insures consistent purity but all other Soybean oils are blended and inconsistent making them unhealthy.
Our pure Soybean Oil is also non hydrogenated, deodorized (meaning it is stripped of all proteins which is where a lot of impurities are stored) and 99% Non GMO (meaning there could be a chance of cross pollination). Therefore our pure Soybean Oil is also very thin and will not over take the vegetation so our vegetables will remain solid and not soggy (with the exception of bell peppers). The Pure Soybean Oil is also odorless and flavorless so it allows our vegetable mix to show their true flavor and produces layers of flavor.
Lastly, we have looked into other options such as Sunflower seed oil and Avocado Oil, but when used for tasting neither was chosen over our current blend in our paneled blind taste tests.
I want to let you know how much we/I truly appreciate you taking the time to email us and to read our response. We are extremely fortunate to have customers like you who ask us questions and compliment our products. Every customer and every jar sold is so important to our continued success. I realize we have people who do not understand the differences between our Soybean Oil and the other oils on the market. I also understand that the blended Soybean Oils can be unhealthy and it is hard to understand the differences!
Again we try to maintain a very healthy product and in making a product that is healthy always brings up questions and or concerns..but match our vegetable based products up against 99% of all other jarred, canned or processed food and ours will stand out in the top 1% as both healthy and tasty!!
I hope I was able to help answer your questions and arm you with some additional info as there is a lot of misunderstanding about our soybean oil and people's thoughts of using Olive Oil in our product...
Thanks again for posting great things about our product as we are a small company and every customer is so very important to us!
Thanks so much - Greg"
