Someone walked up at a farmers market, looked at our oils, and said "seed oils are all poison."
I get it. That opinion is everywhere right now and honestly, for a lot of the oils people are talking about, it's not wrong.
But I asked him something.
If you see a pumpkin seed sitting there, is that poison?
No?
Okay, now if I squeeze it really hard and extract the oil and everything beneficial in it, does it magically become bad for you?
He thought about it for a second.
That's the conversation I want to have here.
The problem isn't seed oil. It's what the process does to it.
When people talk about seed oils being harmful, they're almost always talking about oils that were extracted at extremely high temperatures, treated with chemical solvents like hexane, then deodorized, bleached, and refined until they look and taste like nothing.
The heat and the chemicals don't just extract the oil.
They damage it.
Oxidized fats, destroyed polyphenols, compounds that were beneficial in the seed reduced to something your body doesn't know what to do with.
A pumpkin seed is not poison. But cook it wrong and refine it hard enough and what you're left with is very different from what you started with.
Cold-pressing is a completely different approach.
You're mechanically pressing the seed at low temperatures to extract the oil without cooking it.
No solvents, no chemicals, no refining.
The idea is to get the oil out while keeping everything that makes it worth pressing in the first place.
Here's the thing nobody tells you though: "cold-pressed" doesn't mean anything legally.
There is no regulated standard for what cold-pressed means in Canada or the US.
Any company can put it on the label. Some are doing it right. A lot are not.
The term gets applied to oils pressed anywhere up to 49 or 50 degrees Celsius in Canada, because there's no law stopping it.
For context, the refining process that produces conventional grocery store seed oils involves temperatures ranging from 85 to over 200 degrees Celsius.
Cold-pressed and refined are not two points on the same scale. They're different processes entirely.
Temperature thresholds exist for a reason, and most brands don't publish theirs because they don't want you asking.
We keep our press temperature under 40C on every single batch. In practice, we usually run well under 30C. That number isn't arbitrary.
It's the threshold above which heat starts to meaningfully degrade the beneficial compounds in the oil.
We track it every press, along with facility temperature, seed moisture content, press speed, and a few other variables. Every batch teaches us something, and that attention to detail is what keeps the quality consistent.
We're also putting that temperature on the bottle now, visibly, because we think transparency on that specific number is how you tell a real cold-pressed oil from one that's just using the language.
Check out our Cold-Pressed Oils here ->
So how do you know if an oil is actually cold-pressed?
Ask the company what their press temperature is.
If they can't tell you or won't tell you, that's your answer.
Look for lab testing on the oil.
Look for a single ingredient list with nothing added.
Look for a company that can tell you where their seeds came from and is willing to talk about their process in specific terms, not just marketing language.
Cold-pressed done right is not the same category as the oils getting bad press right now. It's closer to the opposite. The seed is not the problem. It never was.
- Levi