Because of its unique blend of fatty acids, the oil from Allanblackia seeds has melting properties that make it excellent to use as structuring fat in food products, e.g. margarines.
Finding sustainable ways to increase production could bring many social, environmental, and economic benefits to the communities which produce Allanblackia.
[1] The genus Allanblackia, which belongs to the family Clusiaceae, consists of nine (possibly ten) tree species, all restricted to Africa.
Allanblackia trees are commonly found in the wet tropical rain belt of West, Central and East Africa (from Sierra Leone to Tanzania).
Very respected amongst his peers, he died at a young age aboard ship off the Cocos Islands in the Bay of Bengal and the genus Allanblackia was named in his memory.
Allanblackia seeds consist of a soft fruit body mesocarp surrounded by hard wooden hull.
Specific physical characteristics of SOS-SOO mixtures, like fat crystallization aspects, have extensively been investigated in model systems.
When initial studies on the potential of wild-harvesting were done in the early 2000s, the expectations were very high predicting annual production of up to 40,000 tonnes of seeds.
[15] Since early 2009, NGOs such as The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and commercial parties have been conducting research programs to investigate the potential to increase the annual production volumes by looking at increased wild-harvesting as well as sustainable domestication of the tree.
The Union for Ethical Biotrade (UEBT) has developed a standard and a verification framework against which the sustainability of the Allanblackia supply chain can be audited and approved.
[20] Wild harvesting as a production method is limited because there are not enough trees to satisfy demand and Allanblackia's flowering and fruiting behavior is erratic.
Secondly, the program consists of developing asexual and sexual propagation protocols, which are necessary to overcome challenges in multiplication such as seed dormancy, long juvenile phase and high variability of desired traits.
However the application never hit the market because larger volumes of the oil were simply not available due to the lack of an organized supply chain.