A pressing business

It may seem obvious but the first step towards a successful oilseed processing business is to sit down... and think hard about whether the investment will pay off. Development organizations, keen to help village communities in Africa, point to the continent's huge imports of vegetable cooking oil, or to the long hours of arduous oilseed crushing by seemingly primitive means. Surely the answer is to introduce better, small-scale, oilseed processing equipment of which there are hundreds of designs available? Such schemes provide employment, income, lower the cost and increase the availability of edible oils and therefore improve nutrition. What can go wrong?

India and Pakistan, countries where domestic production of edible oils has soared in recent years, illustrate some of the pitfalls. Not least among these is the reliability of both equipment and operator. Extractors and expellers require careful maintenance because the nature of the work inevitably puts considerable stresses on machined parts in the expelling chamber. The availability and cost of spares should be one of the first considerations when purchasing equipment, and spares should be bought in advance of need, to avoid long periods when the expeller is out of action. Nothing drives a customer away more quickly than an unreliable operation.

Similarly, the operator must be committed to producing a high quality, clean product. One of the features of edible oil is that it can be very easily tainted by impurities which impart off-flavours to the food being cooked. India found it necessary to ban small scale processors of mustard seed following cases of widespread contamination. Only those operators who sold oil in sealed containers, rather than loose, were allowed to continue. The effect was to cause considerable hardship, not only to the outlawed processors but to those who could not afford to buy oil in quantities greater than for their daily need.

But long before a choice is required about which equipment to buy, come the harder questions: whether there is a market for the increased production; whether there will be a steady supply of oilseeds for crushing; whether the cost of the raw material, and the price obtainable for the product, is likely to allow sufficient margin for start-up, operating costs and profit. Less easy to quantify is the likely reaction to any new processing venture by those who see their own businesses threatened. Official health inspectors may receive a 'tip-off' that the new venture is producing oil which is not meeting health requirements.

Finding trustworthy machine operators is another challenge that many oil processing entrepreneurs encounter, which is why family businesses are often the most successful. Studies in Zimbabwe have shown that worker dishonesty and unreliable supply of seed are the two overwhelming constraints to success. It may be that for oil processing to be successful, the first requirement is to grow the oilseed.

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