Wood-Pressed, Cold-Pressed, Refined — What These Words Actually Mean

Walk down the oil aisle of any modern Indian grocery and the labels read like a small museum of marketing. Cold-pressed. Wood-pressed. Filtered. Refined. Double-filtered. Single-source. Kachi ghani. Pure. Premium.

Half of these terms mean nothing in particular. A few mean very specific things. And the price difference between the cheapest litre and the most expensive can be a factor of five, often for oil that came out of the same mill.

This is a buyer's guide. We sell cold-pressed oils ourselves, and there is no way to write this honestly without that being relevant, but the goal here is to give you the framework to evaluate any oil — ours or anyone else's.

Kachi ghani, wood-pressed, cold-pressed — mostly the same thing

The starting point is the press itself. Until industrial extraction arrived in India in the early twentieth century, every oil in the country was pressed using a ghani — a wooden mortar-and-pestle apparatus, originally pulled by a bullock or driven by hand, that crushed oilseeds slowly between a vertical wooden pestle and the curved walls of the mortar.

"Kachi ghani" — the phrase you'll see on many oil labels — literally means "raw mill" in Hindi. It refers to oil pressed without applying heat to the seed before extraction. In practice, the friction of the press itself generates some heat, but the temperature stays well below the point at which the oil's natural compounds begin to break down. Industry convention is that anything below 49°C (120°F) qualifies as "cold-pressed."

"Wood-pressed" and "cold-pressed" are, in the Indian context, usually describing the same thing. A wooden ghani, operating slowly, produces cold-pressed oil. The terms have gone slightly out of sync in modern marketing — some cold-pressed oils today are extracted using slow-moving metal presses instead of traditional wooden ghanis, and the extraction temperatures remain broadly similar, so the practical difference for most household cooking is small. A newer category — stainless-steel screw presses with cooling jackets — is debatable: it's technically within the cold-press temperature threshold, but it isn't wood or metal-ghani pressed in the traditional sense, and the slower, gentler traditional presses tend to retain more aroma.

Our coconut, groundnut, mustard, sunflower, and sesame oils are all pressed using wood or metal cold-press methods at our Bengaluru unit. See our process for the specific equipment and approach we use.

Refined oil is a completely different process

Refined oil is not pressed. Or rather, the seeds are first pressed (mechanically, with heat) to extract maybe 50–60% of the oil, and then the leftover meal is treated with a solvent — almost always hexane, a petroleum derivative — that dissolves the remaining oil out of the meal. The hexane is then evaporated off. This extraction step recovers an additional 30–40% of oil, taking total yield up to 90–95%.

The extracted oil at this stage is dark, smelly, and unpleasant. It then goes through several refining steps: degumming (to remove phospholipids), neutralisation (to remove free fatty acids), bleaching (to remove pigments), and deodorising (to remove odour). The bleaching step uses fuller's earth or activated clays. The deodorising step heats the oil to around 250°C under vacuum.

What emerges is a clear, colourless, odourless oil with a high smoke point and a long shelf life. It is also stripped of nearly all the natural antioxidants, vitamin E, lecithin, and minor compounds that the seed originally contained. The fatty-acid backbone — saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated content — remains roughly the same. Everything else is gone.

For a more detailed walk-through of the process, see our earlier piece, How Your Cooking Oil Is Really Made — and Why the Method Matters.

The yield problem is the price problem

This is the simplest way to understand why cold-pressed oil costs two to five times more than refined oil from the same seed. A wooden ghani pressing groundnut gets you roughly 280g of oil from a kilogram of peanut. Solvent extraction gets you roughly 470g. The cold-pressed oil has to pay back the cost of that 190g of "missing" oil.

There is no shortcut around this maths. Anyone selling cold-pressed oil at the price of refined oil is either subsidising the operation, mislabeling the product, or blending the two — which is unfortunately common in the unregulated lower end of the market.

How to actually tell what you're buying

A few honest signs of cold-pressed oil that are hard to fake:

Aroma. Cold-pressed coconut oil smells of coconut. Cold-pressed groundnut oil smells of peanuts. Cold-pressed black mustard oil burns your nose. Refined oils are designed to be odourless. If your "cold-pressed" oil has no smell, it most probably isn't.

Cloudiness or sediment. Unfiltered cold-pressed oils carry fine plant material from the seed. A faint cloudiness, a trace of sediment at the bottom of the bottle, a hint of haze — these are the signatures of an oil that hasn't been bleached or filter-pressed. Commercial refining removes all of this. Industrial polish is the marker of an industrial process.

Colour variation between batches. Two bottles of refined groundnut oil from the same brand will look identical. Two bottles of cold-pressed groundnut oil might have noticeably different shades — earlier-season peanuts produce a paler oil than late-season ones, rain-fed crops differ from irrigated, and so on. Visible variation between batches is a feature, not a flaw.

Shorter shelf life. Refined oils last 12–18 months on a shelf. Cold-pressed oils last 6 months from pressing. The presence of natural compounds that haven't been stripped out makes the oil more nutritious and also more perishable. If your supplier claims a 12-month shelf life on a cold-pressed oil, they have either pasteurised the oil (defeating the point) or are not telling you the whole truth.

For more buying signals, our FAQ page covers a few additional checks that work in the shop and at home.

When refined oil is fine

Refined oil is not poison. For high-heat industrial cooking, deep-frying restaurant volumes, or specific commercial applications where flavour neutrality is essential, refined oil is the correct choice. The problem is not that refined oil exists; it is that refined oil has become the default in homes that have no industrial reason to prefer it.

For a household making everyday meals, in quantities that mean a litre of oil lasts two weeks, the case for refined oil is weak. The case for cold-pressed is mostly that it tastes like the thing it's made from, and that it carries the nutrients of the seed forward instead of leaving them in a chemical wash somewhere in a factory.

That's the buyer's calculation. The rest is brand and price comparison. If you're trying to decide which specific cold-pressed oil to keep in your kitchen for what kind of cooking, see Mustard Oil vs Groundnut Oil — Which Suits South Indian Cooking?

Related reading

• Mustard Oil vs Groundnut Oil — Which Suits South Indian Cooking?
• How Your Cooking Oil Is Really Made
• How India's Relationship With Cooking Oils Changed Over Time
• Shop all cold-pressed edible oils

Frequently asked questions

Are "wood-pressed" and "cold-pressed" oils the same thing?

Almost always yes, in the Indian context. A wooden ghani operates slowly enough that the oil never reaches the temperature threshold that disqualifies it from being called cold-pressed (49°C). Some cold-press machines replace the wooden cylinder with a metal one but run at similarly low speeds, so the temperature stays within range. Newer stainless-steel screw presses with active cooling sit at the edge of the definition — within the temperature limit, but a different process from traditional ghani pressing.

Is hexane-extracted oil dangerous?

Not in the sense of acute toxicity — the hexane is evaporated off before bottling and residual amounts are well below regulatory limits. What you are losing with hexane-extracted oil is what was stripped out during refining: vitamin E, antioxidants, natural plant compounds, and characteristic flavour. The concern with refined oil is equally about what's missing and what's left behind.

Why do some cold-pressed oils cost twice as much as others?

Three reasons usually: the seed source (native varieties cost more than commodity), the press itself (a true wooden ghani turns slower than a metal ghani or a newer screw press and yields less), and packaging (bottles, smaller batches, and shorter shelf life all add cost). Brand premium is also a factor, but the structural cost differences are real.

Can I tell if an oil is genuinely cold-pressed at home?

You can get most of the way there. Smell the oil — it should carry the seed's natural aroma. Hold the bottle up to light — look for cloudiness or trace sediment, the marks of an unfiltered oil. Check the colour against a previous bottle from the same brand — some variation between batches is normal for cold-pressed. A perfectly clear, colourless, odourless oil claiming to be cold-pressed is worth questioning.

What does "filtered" cold-pressed oil mean?

Some producers do a light mechanical filtration after pressing to remove larger sediment while keeping the natural plant compounds. This is acceptable and produces a clearer oil without compromising nutritional content. "Filtered" is different from "refined" — filtering uses physical mesh, refining uses chemicals and heat. A filtered cold-pressed oil is still a cold-pressed oil.