UK supermarket’s viral orangutan ad slammed by oil giant

A British supermarke t chain’s viral commercial about an orangutan left homeless because of deforestation from palm oil planting was slammed as a cheap publicity stunt by a major industry body yesterday. The Christmas ad -- which features a cartoon orangutan telling a little girl that its jungle home had been destroyed -- has racked up millions of views on social media and sparked the trending hashtag #NoPalmOilChristmas on Twitter.

The multi-billion-dollar palm oil industry was not impressed by the Iceland ad, dubbed “Rang-tan”, which calls for consumers to be aware of the environmental impact of the world’s most widely used vegetable oil. “Banning palm oil is not the solution. Boycotting is not the solution,” Darrel Webber, chief executive of the Malaysia-based Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), said yesterday. “Retailers’ margins are very small these days. The cheapest way to get publicity is the best way for them,” he added.

Frozen food specialist Iceland has previously announced it would stop using palm oil, found in everything from margarine and biscuits to soap and shampoo, over concerns that it causes widespread environmental destruction. “We have not removed palm oil from our own label food as ‘a marketing gimmick’, but to raise public awareness of the continuing destruction of the rainforest,” Iceland managing director Richard Walker said in an email to Bloomberg News.