How to judge cold-pressed oil at home
Smell, colour, sediment and the fridge test: simple checks to tell good wooden-pressed oil from blended oil.
What goes into the price of a litre of chekku oil
Seed, yield, power and bottling: why wooden-pressed groundnut oil costs ₹340 a litre.
The most common question at our counter is why our groundnut oil costs ₹340 a litre when a packet of refined oil costs much less. Here is the arithmetic, using this month’s numbers.
The seed is the biggest cost. Good bold groundnut from Namakkal and Attur costs us about ₹115 a kilo this season, shelled and cleaned. A wooden chekku gets about 400 ml of oil from a kilo, so one litre of oil needs 2.5 kg of groundnut. That is ₹288 in seed alone. Refineries use solvent extraction to take out almost all the oil, but we only press, so more oil stays in the cake.
The cake brings some of it back. We sell the leftover oil cake to dairy farmers at about ₹45 a kilo, and each litre of oil leaves roughly 1.5 kg of cake. That recovers around ₹65 per litre.
Then come the running costs per litre: about ₹15 for electricity, since the chekku turns slowly for 90 minutes per batch; ₹30 for wages for the three people who load, press and bottle; ₹12 for the bottle, cap and label; and about ₹20 for rent, repairs and wood for the pestle, which we replace every two years. That brings the cost to about ₹300 a litre before delivery. Our margin is the remaining ₹40. When seed prices rise after a poor harvest, our price rises too, and we put a note on the counter saying why.
