Why cold-pressed

What the phrase means

Cold-pressing describes extraction where the seed is crushed mechanically and the temperature is never allowed to climb past roughly 45°C. There is no chemical solvent, no bleaching earth, and no deodorising step. The oil that comes out is the oil that was in the seed.

Industrial extraction works differently. Seed is heated, treated with a solvent to pull out the last few percent of oil, then refined, bleached and deodorised until the result is clear, neutral and identical batch to batch. It is efficient, and it is why refined oil is cheaper.

What heat takes away

Heat is the variable that matters. Above about 50°C the aromatic compounds that give groundnut oil its character begin to break down, and vitamin E degrades. Deodorising, which runs far hotter, removes what is left of the smell — which is the point, but it also removes the evidence that the oil came from a specific seed grown in a specific place.

This is why our oil is not perfectly uniform. A batch pressed in March will smell slightly different from one pressed in August, because the groundnuts were different. We consider that a feature.

What you actually notice

Three things, in our experience. The smell, immediately on opening. The colour, which is deeper and slightly cloudy rather than water-clear. And a fine sediment that settles at the base of the bottle over a few weeks — seed particles too small to filter out with cotton and too harmless to justify chemical clarification.

The honest trade-offs

Cold-pressed oil costs more, because the same kilo of seed yields noticeably less oil. It also keeps for less time — nine months rather than the year and a half a refined oil manages — because the compounds that make it taste of something are the same ones that eventually oxidise.

We are not going to tell you it will change your health. We will tell you what is in the bottle, where it came from, and when it was pressed, and let you decide whether that is worth the difference in price.