Nivea

I e-mailed Nivea almost a month ago and it had been so long since I contacted them that I thought they had decided to ignore my inquiry but a few days ago I received a reply; it was very informative and most importantly in my opinion, did not come across as an automated reply.

Essentially they told me that they do use palm oil derivatives in certain products, that it is very hard to track the sustainability of the palm oil source but that they are working within the RSPO for traceable palm oil- (the woman who wrote the e-mail put it much more eloquently than that).

 On the face of it the reply from Nivea is not any different from the others I have received, however, it is. In the last paragraph, the woman writes- 'If there is  particular product you are interested in please advise and we can check the ingredients for you.' No other company has made this offer to me so far. It turns out that there is no need to e-mail them because they actually list palm oil as 'palmitate' rather than some of the more obscure names, so at least their customers can make informed buying decisions.

According to the Corpotations...

For the past two months I have been trying to find out exactly which products that I buy, or that other people are likely to buy, contain Palm Oil by e-mailing them.

According to the UK branch of Kraft, Oreos, Philadelphia, Cadbury's Turkish Delight and Diam Bars do not contain Palm Oil. If this is true then I am extremely happy because I LOVE Oreos and Philadelphia cream cheese but I was loath to post this on The List as I wrote to Cadburys (owned by Kraft) a couple of weeks before I wrote to Kraft and Cadburys told me that all of their chocolate products contained palm oil.

I also e-mailed Colgate Palmolive who told me that Colgate doesn't contain palm oil, but various lists on the internet say that they do. I am going to send another message to them and in the meantime Colgate toothpaste shall be removed from The List.