Beef tallow trend: overview
- Politics can move an ingredient faster than science can: MAHA-era guidance rehabilitated beef tallow decades after government policy helped kill it
- Tallow’s growth ($1.1bn, +275% in three years) has pulled it from niche wellness brands into mainstream players like Conagra and Utz
- Its momentum is tied to one administration’s stance, so it carries real policy risk alongside its cost, supply and dietary-restriction downsides
For nearly 50 years, food manufacturers invested billions replacing animal fats with vegetable oils in response to public health guidance.
Today, they are spending money to put beef tallow back in because a growing number of consumers – and a US administration – see it as the more natural choice.
Conagra Brands is one of many to follow the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) route, highlighting beef tallow on the packaging of its Rebel Roots fries.
Utz is another big name to follow suit, with Boulder Canyon potato chips now cooked in beef tallow, while dozens of smaller brands have emerged around the promise of cooking with animal fat instead of seed oils.
What looked like a fringe movement has rapidly become a commercial category worth watching – and a rare case of government guidance actively pulling an ingredient back onto shelves rather than pushing it off.
According to SPINS data, US sales of products containing beef tallow reached around $1.1bn in the year to March 2026, up roughly 275% over three years. That kind of growth inevitably attracts multinational manufacturers, retailers and ingredient suppliers looking for the next premium positioning opportunity.
Is beef tallow genuinely rewriting the rules of reformulation or is it simply the first ingredient to benefit from the political and cultural momentum behind Robert F Kennedy Jr’s MAHA movement?
When government helped kill the fat
The turning point for saturated fat wasn’t just science: it was science translated into policy. It started in the 1950s, when American physiologist Ancel Keys linked saturated fat consumption to higher cholesterol and heart disease risk. His research remained controversial in some quarters, but it shaped nutrition policy for decades.
By the 1970s, that science had become official guidance. US Senate hearings and early federal dietary goals openly encouraged lower saturated fat consumption, pushing the industry to replace animal fats with vegetable oils and encouraging consumers to choose leaner meats. When the first US Dietary Guidelines were formalised in 1980, limiting saturated fat was written into government advice that would steer school lunches, food labelling and manufacturer formulation for the next 45 years.
Manufacturers responded quickly, not just because vegetable oils were viewed as healthier, but because regulatory direction made animal fat a liability and vegetable oil the safer commercial bet. It was also cheaper and easier to source consistently. Thousands of products were reformulated, replacing beef tallow, lard and dripping with soybean, sunflower, corn, rapeseed (canola) and, in some applications, palm oil.
The best-known example was McDonald’s, which switched its famous fries from beef tallow to vegetable oil in 1990 after years of pressure from health advocates, consumer groups and government nutrition guidance. That decision became symbolic of an industry-wide, policy-driven retreat from animal fats.
Ironically, by the late 1990s, many of the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils used to replace animal fats were found to contain trans fats, later shown to raise cardiovascular risk. Government stepped in again: the US FDA moved to eliminate artificial trans fats from the food supply, forcing another wave of reformulation and pushing the industry toward non-hydrogenated oils, high-oleic blends and improved palm-based shortenings.
Today, the narrative has done a 180. Nutrition science has grown more nuanced and rather than treating all saturated fat as inherently harmful, researchers increasingly focus on overall dietary patterns, food quality, processing levels and what a fat is replacing. Alongside that has come a rise in keto, paleo and carnivore diets, the anti-seed-oil movement and, more recently, MAHA, which has rehabilitated beef tallow in the eyes of many consumers.
That doesn’t mean scientific consensus has flipped. Most major public health organisations, including the World Health Organization and the American Heart Association, continue to recommend limiting saturated fat intake and favouring unsaturated fats as part of a balanced diet. What’s changed isn’t the underlying research consensus so much as who holds the policy pen.
The first MAHA ingredient to go mainstream
Unlike collagen, activated charcoal or coconut water, beef tallow’s biggest advantage is that it’s become one of the defining symbols of a political movement with real institutional reach.
RFK Jr has repeatedly championed beef tallow over seed oils, even publicly demonstrating deep frying in beef tallow as an example of ‘the MAHA way’.
More significantly, January’s updated US dietary guidance placed greater emphasis on traditional fats including beef tallow, butter and olive oil – giving the ingredient a level of institutional credibility that would have seemed unlikely only a few years ago. Where the 1980 guidelines pushed manufacturers away from animal fat, the 2026 revision does the opposite and the food industry is responding to the policy signal just as quickly as it did the first time around.
That combination of political endorsement, consumer curiosity and retail demand is difficult for manufacturers to ignore.
The first wave came from challenger brands. Start-ups like Ancient Crunch (July 2022), Teddy’s Tallow Chips (April 2025), Beefy’s Own (2022), Graze (May 2026) and Hola Mija (2021) built their identities around handcrafted potato chips and snack foods fried in grass-fed beef tallow rather than vegetable oils, positioning themselves within the growing ‘no seed oils’ movement and promising shorter ingredient lists and more traditional cooking methods.
Initially, these launches looked aimed at wellness enthusiasts shopping in specialist retailers. That perception changed once companies the size of Conagra and Utz entered the market. Large manufacturers rarely move first – they typically wait until consumer demand, and often regulatory tailwind, justifies dedicating production capacity and retail space to an emerging trend. Their arrival suggests beef tallow has moved beyond social media into genuine commercial and political consideration.
Yet executives remain cautious. Utz chief executive Howard Friedman has acknowledged that consumer interest could fade as quickly as it emerged, making flexibility more important than committing entire portfolios to animal fat and, implicitly, more important than betting the business on a policy stance that could shift again with the next administration. Manufacturers have learnt from previous trends and previous policy reversals that today’s must-have ingredient can become tomorrow’s forgotten formulation.
Weighing the pros and cons
For
* Political and regulatory tailwind: For the first time in decades, federal dietary guidance is actively encouraging an animal fat rather than discouraging it, giving brands institutional cover to reformulate.
* Consumer perception: Positioned as natural, traditional and minimally processed, tallow fits neatly alongside the broader anti-seed-oil and clean-label movements.
* Flavour and functionality in frying: Many chefs and manufacturers argue that it produces a crisper texture and richer flavour than vegetable oil in fried applications.
* Premium positioning: It allows brands to charge more and differentiate on shelf at a time when many snack categories are fighting on price.
Against
* Cost and supply: Commodity vegetable oils remain significantly cheaper at industrial scale, and only a relatively small proportion of rendered beef fat becomes food-grade edible tallow – rapid demand growth could strain availability and pricing.
* Narrower consumer base: Products containing beef tallow are unsuitable for vegetarians and can complicate halal, kosher and other dietary requirements, while export markets often demand broader dietary flexibility than domestic launches.
*Scientific consensus hasn’t moved: Most major health bodies still recommend limiting saturated fat, meaning brands are riding a political and cultural wave that runs somewhat ahead of the underlying research.
* Policy risk: An ingredient whose momentum is this closely tied to one administration’s guidance is exposed if that guidance changes again.
The bigger question isn’t beef tallow but where food policy goes next.
Whether beef tallow ultimately becomes a permanent ingredient or a passing fad may almost be beside the point.
Its rapid rise shows how quickly food formulation priorities can shift when politics, culture and consumer behaviour align – and how just as quickly they moved the other way, twice before.
Studies:
Newport MT, Dayrit FM. The Lipid-Heart Hypothesis and the Keys Equation Defined the Dietary Guidelines but Ignored the Impact of Trans-Fat and High Linoleic Acid Consumption. Nutrients. 2024 May 11;16(10):1447. https://doi:10.3390/nu16101447. PMID: 38794685; PMCID: PMC11123895.
Lichtenstein AH, Amit Khera Ar, Cheryl A.M. Anderson CAM, et al. 2026 Dietary Guidance to Improve Cardiovascular Health: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association. Circulation (2026). Volume 153, Number 18. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001435
Miller M, Aggarwal M, Allen K. et al. A Clinician’s Guide for Trending Cardiovascular Nutritional Controversies in 2026. JACC Adv. 2026 Mar, 5 (3) . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacadv.2026.102591
