[ JOURNAL ] Everyone Has an Opinion on Palm Oil. We Went to earn ours.
I traveled to Ecuador to learn more about one of the most complicated ingredients in beauty.
By: Mackenzie Zoppi, Director, Mission Integration
The first thing I remember about Ecuador isn't the rainforest. It is the welcome.
After hours winding along bumpy back roads in Ecuador's Amazon region, our van pulled into a small family-owned oil palm plantation. Waiting for us was Señor Luis, his wife, and their two daughters. Gold balloons spelling “BIENVENIDOS” hung across the entrance and homemade empanadas waited on the table.
Then, through a translator, Señor Luis unfolded a page of carefully prepared notes and shared the story of his farm, his family, and the care they put into growing oil palm trees. As he spoke, I felt my eyes fill with tears. I traveled more than 3,500 miles from Los Angeles with my colleague Annie from Counter's Social Media team, expecting to better understand one of the beauty industry's most controversial ingredients. Instead, we found ourselves thinking about the families and farmers behind a supply chain most of us never see.
Read the ingredient list on a beauty product and you probably won’t see the words “palm oil.” That’s because palm-derived ingredients can appear under more than 200 different names, making them difficult to identify. They’re widely used in beauty because palm is a versatile, stable, and highly functional ingredient across many types of formulas. But they’re much more common than most people realize—partly because they often exist quietly in the background of formulas, and because conversations around palm oil can be complicated by its links to deforestation, habitat loss, and human rights issues in some producing regions.
That complexity is also why simply avoiding palm isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Palm is one of the world’s most efficient oil crops, producing more oil per acre than alternatives like coconut, sunflower, soybean, and rapeseed oils. Moving away from palm without looking at the full supply chain can sometimes mean using more land or shifting environmental impacts elsewhere rather than solving the problem.
Responsible sourcing is a core part of my work at Counter. We don’t think transparency ends with a fully disclosed ingredient list. Transparency looks like understanding where ingredients come from, how they’re produced, and acknowledging the tradeoffs—and then sharing what we learn. Our goal isn’t to avoid difficult ingredients by pretending they don’t exist. It’s to ask better questions about the ones we use, understand their impact, set higher standards, and use our influence to push supply chains forward. That’s what brought me to Ecuador.
Counter has more RSPO Certified
trademarked products than any other
beauty brand in North America.
In early June, we traveled with our partners from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the leading organization that sets standards for more responsible palm oil production and supply chains, to Shushufindi, in Ecuador's northeastern Amazon. Over several days, we followed oil palm fruit from harvest to processing and met the many people and places that shape its journey—from smallholder farms and community leaders to mill operators and certification experts. More than anything, we listened.
At Señor Luis's small, family-run operation, much of the work is done by hand: pollinating the trees, fertilizing the ground, harvesting the fruit, hauling it to the mill, and keeping detailed records. Señor Luis is not an exception. In Ecuador, roughly 85–90% of palm oil comes from smallholders like him rather than large operations. He's one of about 300 smallholders producing in the Shushufindi region alone. Listening to him, I wasn't hearing about a supply chain, I was hearing about someone's life. His story doesn't prove anything about our sourcing policy, and I don't want it to. But it’s stayed with me since. It's a lot easier to talk about supply chains in the abstract than it is to stand on someone's land and understand how much depends on people you'll likely never meet, doing the work required to meet higher standards, day after day.
Standing in the oil palm fields, I held two conflicting truths at once. The working landscape was beautiful in its own way, and I couldn't ignore that natural rainforest had likely once stood where I was standing. That tension stayed with me. I don’t think responsible sourcing is about finding ingredients with perfect stories. I think it’s about being honest about the realities behind the ingredients we use and working to make them better. We can't undo the past, but we can be accountable for what happens next. If the beauty industry continues to rely on palm-derived ingredients, we have a responsibility to help improve the systems behind them. And that starts with brands being willing to look closer, acknowledge what’s complicated, and take action to improve the systems they’re part of.
"Responsible sourcing isn’t about finding ingredients with perfect stories. It means being honest about the realities behind them and working to make them better."
The vivid details I have from this trip can’t be captured in a sustainability report or a spreadsheet: the intense equatorial heat and humidity that soaked us in sweat before the day even started, the feeling of my boots pulling free from thick mud with each step, and the bright orange stain left on my hands after holding a freshly harvested bunch of palm fruit. I didn't expect the ripe fruit to be so striking. Against the deep greens and browns of the landscape, the clusters glowed a vivid red-orange, each one reflecting months of work before it ever reached a mill or became an ingredient.
I left Ecuador more aware than ever of the complexities surrounding palm oil. But I also left with a deeper understanding of what responsible sourcing requires: looking beyond the ingredient itself and seeing the people, decisions, and systems behind it. I can’t think about our work on palm without thinking about Señor Luis and the many farmers around the world who help bring these ingredients into the products we use every day. It’s easy to talk about supply chains as if they are just systems to manage. But behind every ingredient are real people, real livelihoods, and real choices. Our responsibility as brands is to understand those connections—and use our influence to help shape what comes next.
The Story Through Annie's Eyes
A behind-the-scenes look at what Annie discovered by going beyond the ingredient label and seeing the palm oil supply chain firsthand.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Mackenzie Zoppi
Director, Mission Integration
Having spent nearly a decade working at the intersection of beauty and social impact, Mackenzie leads initiatives across advocacy and responsible sourcing to advance Counter’s mission to set the definitive standard for clean.
Favorite Counter Product: Countertime Mineral Boost Hydrating Essence
[ SHOWING OUR WORK ]
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We set the bar, then raise it
Counter has more RSPO Certified trademarked products than any other beauty brand in North America.¹ This milestone reflects our ongoing commitment to greater transparency, traceability, and third-party verification.
Where we stand
Today, 92% of Counter products contain at least one palm-derived ingredient, and 72% of the palm-derived ingredients we source are RSPO Certified.²
Key Partnerships
Counter is an RSPO Member and is RSPO Supply Chain Certified. This certification allows eligible products to carry the RSPO Certified Trademark, verifying that certified palm-derived ingredients have moved through an audited supply chain.
Our approach
Palm-derived ingredients play an important role in beauty formulations, helping create the textures, performance, and stability consumers expect from their products. We use them thoughtfully and prioritize RSPO Certified ingredients when they are part of our formulas.
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¹Based on RSPO Certified Trademark approvals as of July 2026; validated internally by RSPO.
² Based on the total kilograms of palm oil, palm kernel oil, and their derivatives purchased during the reporting period. Data reported in Counter's third-party audit conducted as part of its RSPO Supply Chain Certification for 2025. Percentages reflect Counter's ingredient portfolio and product assortment at the time of the audit.
