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What does an oil mill cost?
Two halves to that question. What you spend to put the line in, which depends on your tonnage and seed, and what the line earns once it runs — which you can work out right now, from your own prices.
Run the numbers
What the mill earns in a day
Set the machine, the seed and your local prices. Everything here is a mass balance on the figures you enter, not a quotation.
| Oil sales | ₹607,000 |
| Cake sales | ₹214,000 |
| Seed cost | −₹713,000 |
| Gross margin per day, before power and labour | ₹107,000 |
| Per month · 25 working days | ₹2,684,000 |
Worked out from the three prices on the left, which are examples. Put your own in before you trust this figure.
The line this needs
| Stage | Duty | Machine | Units |
|---|
Each machine is sized from the capacity we publish on its own page. Stages we do not publish a capacity for are sized to your layout.
Machine list, layout and power load for your numbers.
What that figure includes, and what it does not
The margin above is gross: oil sales plus cake sales, less the cost of the seed. It does not carry power, labour, consumables, finance or depreciation, and it assumes you sell everything you press. Take it as the ceiling the mill works towards on those prices, not as profit.
Two inputs move it more than the rest. The oil content of your seed sets how much product there is to sell at all, and the price you get for cake decides whether the by-product carries a quarter of your revenue or a tenth. Change either in the calculator and watch the gross margin move; that is the sensitivity your project actually lives on.
Capital
The press is not the whole budget
Of the five, we quote the first two. The rest decide the project cost as much as the machinery does, and they are where estimates usually go wrong.
- The pressing lineCleaning, conditioning, the expeller itself, filtration and the conveying between them. This is the part we quote.
- Steam and powerA boiler or thermic fluid heater for the cooker, and a connected load the press and ancillaries can draw without browning out.
- Civil work and buildingFoundations for the press, a floor that takes the load, and height for the elevators. Not something we supply, and usually underestimated.
- StorageSeed in, oil and cake out. Days of stock on each side decides how much working capital the mill ties up.
- Working capitalSeed is bought before oil is sold. At the tonnages below this is routinely larger than the machinery bill.
Why there is no price list on this page
Because the same tonnage can be two different machine lists. A mill crushing 11 tonnes a day of mustard on final press and one crushing 11 tonnes of soybean as a pre-press for an extraction plant need different preparation, different steam and a different press duty. Publishing one number for "an 11 TPD oil mill" would be wrong for at least one of them, and you would find that out at the quotation rather than here.
Tell us the seed, the tonnage per day and whether you are selling cake as feed or sending it for extraction, and you get a machine list, a layout and the connected load with the price — not a figure that moves when you ask a second question.
Questions buyers ask
Before you enquire
- How much does it cost to start an oil mill?
- It depends on the tonnage you intend to crush, the seed, and how much of the line you buy new. We do not publish a price list because a figure quoted without your capacity and your seed would be wrong in both directions. What we can tell you before any of that is what the mill would earn: the calculator above works that out from your own seed and local prices.
- What is the payback period on an oil expeller?
- Work it from the gross margin above rather than from a rule of thumb. Take the monthly margin the calculator gives you, subtract your power, labour and finance costs, and divide the installed cost by what is left. We will give you the installed cost for your layout; only you know the other three.
- Is a small oil mill profitable?
- It can be, and the margin per tonne is driven more by the oil content of your seed and the price you get for cake than by the size of the press. Cake is often a quarter or more of total sales, which is why the calculator prices it separately instead of treating it as a by-product.
- Why will you not give me a price over email?
- We will, once we know the capacity, the seed and whether the duty is final press or pre-press. Those three change the machine list, and a number sent before them is a guess that gets corrected later. Send them and you get a machine list, a layout and a power load with the price.
Tell us your seed and capacity
Three short steps. Our team replies on WhatsApp, by phone or by email, whichever you prefer.