Thonmai
Walk into a traditional oil mill in Tamil Nadu and you'll hear it before you see it — the slow, heavy creak of a wooden "chekku" turning at a pace that hasn't changed in generations. It's a deliberately unhurried process, and that's the entire point.
What "wood-pressed" actually means
A wood chekku extracts oil by crushing seeds between a wooden mortar and pestle, rotated slowly — traditionally by bullock, now usually by a slow-turning motor built to mimic the same speed. Because the machine never spins fast, friction stays low, and so does the temperature of the oil as it's pressed out. That's the "cold press" part: the oil rarely crosses 40–50°C during extraction, compared to the much higher heat used in industrial expeller or solvent-extraction methods.
Why the temperature matters
Heat is efficient for large-scale extraction — it loosens more oil out of the seed, faster. But heat also degrades some of what makes the oil worth pressing in the first place: natural aroma compounds, certain heat-sensitive nutrients, and the flavour that makes groundnut oil taste like groundnuts rather than a neutral cooking medium. Low-temperature pressing trades some yield efficiency for a more intact, more flavourful oil.
The three steps, in practice
Select — we start with handpicked, premium-grade groundnuts, since no pressing method can fix a poor-quality seed.
Cold press — the seeds go through the wood chekku at low temperature, with nothing added at any stage.
Pure oil — what comes out is filtered for clarity, but not refined, bleached, or deodorised — so the oil keeps its natural colour, aroma and nutrient profile.
What this isn't
It's worth being precise here: "cold-pressed" is not a regulated, independently verified claim in India the way an FSSAI licence number is. It describes a method, not a certification. What we can point to concretely is our FSSAI licence, IS 544:2014 compliance, and lab-tested purity — see the label on every Thonmai bottle, or our Groundnut Oil page for the exact numbers.