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Icecream deal a sweet success

Icecream deal a sweet success

A new partnership between the Adelaide Zoo and a local ice cream company has worked out a treat.

It's meant visitors can support an endangered species and have their desserts too.

It's a little known fact that the zoo is one of the state's biggest sellers of ice cream.

So when it began campaigning against palm-oil, it found itself in a pickle.

Orangutan trainer Jodie Ellen explains: “Palm oil is hugely devastating to the forests within South-East Asia, hundreds of hectares are being chopped down every hour of every day.”

Those forests are home to orangutans like Karta and Kluet and it's feared the collection of palm oil will wipe out the species.

Unfortunately that meant one thing for Zoos SA.

“To support our conservation efforts we had to remove all palm oil products from our retail sites,” says Alison Hassel.

The kiosk initially stocked icecream made by Streets, but when approached by the zoo to change their recipe, the company refused. Streets says it tries to use one hundred percent sustainable palm oil in its products instead.

So local company Golden North came to the rescue.

Trevor Pomery from Golden North says it wasn’t an easy process: “First you have to establish all the ingredients we use, did they have palm oil in them.”

A portion of sales from their one litre tubs came back to our conservation efforts.

A sweet success indeed.