(Yicai Global) Dec. 27 -- China has passed new national food safety requirements for edible oils and will likely implement them next year, said Wang Ruiyuan, chief expert of the Chinese Cereals and Oils Association and president of its oil branch.

"The biggest feature of the new standard is it requires oil composition ratio of blended cooking oils to be marked in the future, although it does not require contents accounting for less than 2 percent to be labeled," NetEase Finance quoted Wang as saying yesterday.

Misrepresentations are common in the blended oil industry, Wang said. "Products that are 0.8 percent olive oil use the name blended olive oil," he said. "Some blended peanut oils are less than 2 percent peanut oil. The root cause of this chaos is that the national standard for edible vegetable blended oil was drafted more than 10 years ago and has not been put into effect."

China is a major cooking oil consumer. The country's market has corn oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, rapeseed oil, peanut oil and many other varieties.

Edible blended oils combine two or more cooking oils to create flavors and nutritional properties based on consumer demand. Many consider their fatty acid composition to be better than those of their unblended counterparts.

As the national standards for blended oils have yet to be introduced, some companies do not label proportions and use low-cost oils as main ingredients, while naming their products after expensive secondary ones.