This ingredient is a blend of two tropical fats: palm fat from the fruit of the oil palm, and shea fat (shea butter) from the nuts of the shea tree, Vitellaria paradoxa, which grows across the savanna belt of West and Central Africa.
Both have melting properties close to those of cocoa butter, so they can be mixed into chocolate to adjust hardness and heat resistance and to replace part of the cocoa butter. EU chocolate rules allow up to 5% of six named vegetable fats, palm and shea among them, in products sold as chocolate, as long as the label says so. M&M Peanut Chocolate lists the blend in the milk chocolate that surrounds each peanut inside its coloured sugar shell.
Refined palm and shea fats contain almost no protein. The M&M’s they appear in, however, contain peanuts and milk, both major allergens.
