Where the Oilseed Crush Sits in 2026

Oilseed processing is one of the few food-adjacent sectors where capacity is being built faster than demand for the finished oil is growing, because the marginal buyer is no longer a food company. It is a refinery. That shift explains most of how a crush project should be financed today.

The headline numbers first. Fortune Business Insights sizes the global oilseed processing market at USD 338.64 billion in 2025, reaching USD 486.80 billion by 2032 at a 5.32% CAGR Fortune Business Insights, 2025. A separate strategic report puts the market at USD 391.2 billion in 2025 against USD 677.1 billion by 2032 on an 8.2% CAGR, with the soybean segment alone reaching USD 198.8 billion at 10.3% and rapeseed/canola compounding at 5.8% Research and Markets, 2025.

Soybean dominance is the structural fact underneath both estimates. Soybean held 50.24% of global oilseed processing share in 2024, driven by acreage in the United States, Brazil and Argentina Fortune Business Insights, 2025.

Capacity is being built against fuel demand, not food demand

In the United States, at least 14 new soy processing projects have been in construction, expansion or development, collectively adding roughly 450 million bushels of soybean demand Governors' Biofuels Coalition. The capital behind that wave is energy capital, not food capital. Chevron put USD 600 million into Bunge Chevron Ag Renewables to roughly double combined capacity at Destrehan, Louisiana and Cairo, Illinois from 7,000 tons per day Biobased Diesel. ADM and Marathon structured a 75:25 joint venture at Spiritwood, North Dakota with Marathon taking exclusive rights to all soybean oil for its Dickinson renewable diesel plant. Phillips 66 invested in Shell Rock Soy Processing in Shell Rock, Iowa for the rights to buy all of the 400-plus million pounds of crude soybean oil it produces at full capacity.

Monthly US crush volumes show how large the base is. NOPA members crushed 200.383 million bushels in January 2025, down 3.0% from December's record 206.604 million but up 7.9% year on year, with soyoil stocks at 1.274 billion pounds at month end NOPA via Energy News, 2025. Those same reports note that weak crush margins and slumping meal prices caused several plants to slow output in prior months, before margins spiked to a three-year high as soyoil rallied. A crush plant is a margin business that can and does idle. Put that in the risk section rather than letting a lender discover it.

The UK picture is the opposite problem

Britain has a feedstock shortage, not a capacity surplus. Final 2025 UK oilseed rape production came in at 893,000 tonnes from 242,000 hectares, with area down 17% year on year even though yields climbed 30% to 3.7 t/ha AHDB, 2025. Set that against UK demand of roughly 2 million tonnes from crushers and feed compounders and the gap is structural. The 2025/26 planted area is forecast to recover 32% to around 317,000 hectares from a 42-year low, which helps, but does not close it.

Crush capacity has thinned too. The main UK sites are Cargill at Liverpool, ADM at Erith in Kent, and Yelo in Warwickshire, which crushes about 100,000 tonnes a year and can produce up to 120 million litres of rapeseed oil. Cargill's closure of its Hull plant removed 200,000 to 250,000 tonnes of crushing capacity from the market Farmers Weekly.

Canada sits between the two: Cargill's new Regina, Saskatchewan plant opened in the second half of 2025 with capacity for 1 million tonnes of canola a year, and USDA FAS forecasts Canadian meal output up about 6% in MY2026/27 USDA FAS GAIN, 2026.

Questions Lenders and Buyers Ask First

These come up in the first fifteen minutes of a credit conversation about a crush project. Answer them in the plan and the meeting becomes about terms, not fundamentals.

What is the difference between cold pressing, expeller pressing and solvent extraction?

Expeller pressing is continuous mechanical extraction through a screw press, invented as a commercial machine by Valerius D. Anderson in 1900 and still the workhorse of small and mid-scale processing. Cold pressing is the same mechanical process held below a defined temperature so the oil can carry a cold-pressed or extra virgin claim. Both recover roughly 75 to 80% of the available oil. Solvent extraction dissolves residual oil out of the cake with hexane and lifts recovery above 97%, but it converts your project from a food factory into a process-safety site.

How much oil comes out of a tonne of seed?

Less than most first drafts assume. Canola and rapeseed are approximately 40 to 45% oil by weight, and a cold press recovers about 75 to 80% of it, so roughly one third of what goes in comes out as oil and two thirds as cake. Pennsylvania-grown canola is documented at 40 to 45% oil with about 80% mechanically recoverable. USDA FAS puts the canola oil extraction rate at about 0.424 on a recent three-year average. Soybeans run differently again: roughly 75% of the bean's weight becomes meal, 20% becomes oil and 5% is hull. Get these ratios wrong in the model and every number downstream is wrong.

Is an oil mill business profitable?

It depends which business you mean, and trade sources are fairly blunt about the spread: bulk oils carry roughly 2 to 3% margins, packaged oils 5 to 10%, and premium oils such as rice bran or canola in retail packaging 20 to 25%. Mustard oil operators in India report 25 to 30% after costs. Selling oil in a tanker is a commodity trade; selling it in a bottle with a story is a brand business. Same press, different P&L.

How much of the cost is fixed, and how does it scale?

Published analysis of small-press economics puts unit fixed costs at roughly 1 to 11 cents per kilogram of canola seed depending on scale, with the press accounting for 24% of total fixed cost at small volumes rising to 35% at larger ones UVM / Penn State oilseed press evaluation. Fixed cost per kilogram moving elevenfold with scale is the detail a credit committee notices is missing.

Capital Required: Three Plants, Three Different Businesses

Most guidance quotes one number for one plant size, usually the size the author sells. "Oilseed processing" actually covers three businesses with capital requirements an order of magnitude apart, and the first decision in the plan is which one you are building.

The top of that range is not theoretical. Trade sources put a 1 TPD complete plant with land, building, machinery, raw material, utilities, labour, permits and marketing at roughly USD 2,600,000 when specified as a full industrial installation rather than a shed with a press in it. The same sources quote $5,000 to $8,000 for a 1 to 15 tonne-per-day imported press unit, around $20,000 to $25,000 for a 15 TPD turnkey set, and approximately $79,500 for a 20 TPD plant ex-works Small Oil Press, 2025. Both sets of numbers are accurate. They are describing different things. The press is cheap; the plant around it is not.

Line-by-line capital checklist

• Screw press or expeller line: $8K–$30K per unit for Farmet UNO/DUO, Komet or Kern Kraft class machines; $5K–$8K for 1–15 t/day imported units
• Seed intake pit, cleaner, destoner, magnet, elevators: $35K–$160K (£28K–£126K) — the line most first budgets omit entirely
• Filtration, settling tanks, oil transfer pumps: $18K–$90K (£14K–£71K)
• Meal cooling, conveying, bagging or bulk-out: $22K–$120K (£17K–£95K)
• Bottling, capping, labelling (premium retail route only): $30K–$180K (£24K–£142K)
• Building shell, slab, three-phase power upgrade, dust-zone classification: $60K–$600K (£47K–£473K)
• Working capital to buy one full seed window: $80K–$900K (£63K–£710K)
• HACCP plan, food-safety consultancy, lab setup, first-year testing: $12K–$45K (£9K–£36K)
• Environmental permitting and process-safety file (solvent routes only): $25K–$120K (£20K–£95K)

Note the shape of that list: across every tier the press is a minority of capital and the seed is a majority of cash. A plan that itemises machinery in detail and summarises working capital in one line is the most common reason crush projects run out of money in month four rather than failing on margin.

One calibration benchmark: the UVM and Penn State press evaluation documented a Keller KEK P0020 bought for $8,300 with freight plus about $600 installation, processing roughly 1,056 lb of seed per 24 hours — a published throughput, and a better anchor for a lean first-stage plan than a vendor capacity claim.

Press Line Equipment: Who Actually Builds It

Equipment specification is where a crush plan earns or loses credibility. Naming machines and manufacturers signals you have had the conversations. Here is the supplier map a competent plan references.

The specification detail that decides your yield

Screw geometry is seed-specific. Kern Kraft's own positioning makes the point: the screw that handles soybeans is not the screw that handles canola, camelina and other smaller seeds. A plan that says it will press "oilseeds" generically invites the question of which screw sets have been costed and how long a changeover takes.

Non-press equipment that gets forgotten

• Seed cleaning before the press. Stones and metal destroy screws; moisture above spec ruins pressing performance and cake stability. Sourcing quality seed at the right price matters as much as the machinery.
• Oil filtration and settling capacity. Crude press oil needs residence time; undersized tankage is the usual reason a small mill misses a bottling schedule.
• Dust extraction and ATEX or NEC area classification. Seed handling generates combustible dust whether or not you use solvent.

Crush Economics: How the Money Actually Works

One number decides whether an oilseed processing business survives, and it is missing from most plans: the crush margin — the combined value of the oil and meal produced, minus the cost of the seed bought to produce them.

The reason is structural: seed is typically 80 to 90% of cost of goods sold, so a conventional net margin percentage is close to meaningless. The NOPA reporting cited above shows it in practice — plants slowed output on weak crush margins and slumping meal prices, then margins spiked to a three-year high when soyoil rallied with crude. Same plants, same capital, completely different economics within months.

A worked example: 6 tonnes a day in Lincolnshire

Take a 6 t/day cold-press rapeseed mill running 260 days a year. It buys 1,560 tonnes of rapeseed at £400 per tonne, or £624,000. At 42% oil content and 78% mechanical recovery it produces roughly 511 tonnes of oil and 1,020 tonnes of cake.

• Bulk crude oil: 511 t at £880/t = £449,680
• Press cake into feed: 1,020 t at £230/t = £234,600
• Total output value: £684,280 against £624,000 of seed
• Gross crush margin: £60,280, or 8.8% over feedstock

That 8.8% does not pay for a building, a team, electricity, insurance and debt service. On those numbers the plant is not viable — the conclusion most first drafts never reach, because they report a margin on a bottled price while quietly ignoring the tonnage sold in bulk.

Now add the bottle. Divert 120 tonnes of that oil into bottled retail at £2.10 per litre net ex-works and the same tonnage returns roughly £273,000 instead of £105,600. That is about £167,000 of extra contribution, against packaging, labelling and distribution costs of roughly £95,000. Net effect: roughly £72,000 of additional annual contribution from 23% of the oil volume. The bottling line, not the press, is what converts an 8.8% crush margin into a business.

Sensitivity is the whole argument

On 1,560 tonnes, a £40 per tonne move in seed price is £62,400. That is larger than the entire base-case crush margin of £60,280. One bad buying decision or one tight harvest erases the year. This is why a crush plan without a three-price sensitivity table reads as naive, and why a plan that leads with one is taken seriously even at small scale.

Read the bottom row carefully. At £440 per tonne the plant loses money on every tonne it crushes before a single fixed cost is paid, and that is roughly a 10% move. A UK rapeseed mill has thinner hedging tools than a US soybean crusher working against a board crush, so the mitigation has to be contractual rather than financial: forward seed contracts with growers at a priced basis, and forward cake sales to a feed merchant.

The three revenue streams to model separately

• Oil. Split the forecast between bulk crude and bottled retail. Bulk is price-taking; bottled carries 28–45% gross and needs a brand and a listing.
• Meal or cake. Priced by protein specification and contracted before commissioning. At USDA's projected $310 per short ton for 2025/26 soybean meal, a primary line rather than a rounding item.
• Toll crushing. A fee per tonne to press a third party's seed; they keep the oil and the cake. Converts commodity price risk into service revenue, and is the most underused stabiliser in small-mill plans during the brand ramp.

Feedstock, Offtake and Who Signs First

The sequencing error that kills crush projects is buying the press before securing the seed and the buyers. Reverse the order and the plan writes itself.

Seed catchment arithmetic

A 20 t/day line running 260 days needs roughly 5,200 tonnes of seed a year. At the UK's 2025 rapeseed yield of 3.7 t/ha that is about 1,400 hectares, far beyond a single family farm. Run this calculation explicitly in the plan: tonnes needed, hectares implied at local yield, grower commitments, and the radius those farms sit within.

Why proximity is the small operator's real advantage

With UK crush capacity concentrated at Liverpool, Erith and Yelo's Warwickshire site, and Cargill's Hull closure having removed 200,000 to 250,000 tonnes, growers in large parts of the country face a long haul to a crusher. Haulage on a low-value commodity is a meaningful share of delivered cost, so a mill genuinely closer to a cluster of farms can pay a competitive farm-gate price and still crush profitably. That is defensible, and it has nothing to do with undercutting ADM.

Offtake structures to name in the plan

• Feed merchant contract for 100% of cake at a priced protein spec with a minimum annual tonnage. The first signature to get.
• Bulk oil offtake to a refiner, food manufacturer or biodiesel producer, with free fatty acid and moisture tolerances written down.
• Retail or foodservice listings for bottled oil, with honest lead times: months for a regional wholesaler, a year or more for a national multiple.
• Toll-crushing agreements with neighbouring growers for crops you do not want to own, such as camelina or linseed.

The large-scale deals in this sector all follow the same template, which is instructive. Phillips 66 contracted the entire crude soybean oil output of Shell Rock Soy Processing. Marathon took exclusive rights to the soybean oil from the ADM joint venture at Spiritwood. Chevron invested in crush capacity specifically to secure feedstock. At every scale, the oil found its buyer before the plant found its investors. If you are planning the reverse order, change the order.

If your plan sits closer to the growing end than the pressing end, the same logic applies in mirror image, and it is worth reading alongside our rapeseed farm business plan template and the soybean oil production business plan template, which handle the agronomic and refining ends of the same chain.

Debt and Equity Routes for a Crush Project

Oilseed processing classifies as NAICS 311224 — Soybean and Other Oilseed Processing, where the SBA small-business size standard is 1,250 employees SBA Table of Small Business Size Standards. Every independent crush startup therefore qualifies comfortably as a small business for 7(a) purposes. Eligibility is not the constraint; size is.

The 7(a) programme caps at $5,000,000 SBA, 7(a) loans, but the ceiling is not the number to plan around. In FY2025 the average 7(a) loan was $477,571, with 65,154 loans originated totalling $32.43 billion LendingTree SBA analysis, FY2025. Set that average against the three capital tiers above and the funding strategy falls out of the arithmetic:

• Farm-gate cold press ($95K–$280K): comfortably inside a single 7(a), often inside a smaller express facility. Equity contribution and personal guarantee will be the negotiation, not loan size.
• Regional expeller mill ($420K–$1.3M): roughly one to three times the FY2025 average. Realistic structure is a 7(a) for working capital and soft costs plus a 504 for real estate and long-life equipment, since 504 pricing on a building beats 7(a) pricing.
• Solvent extraction plant ($2.6M+): above what 7(a) alone will sensibly carry. Expect a bank facility alongside contracted-offtake-backed equity, which is the structure the large JVs use at scale.

What a crush-specific credit file needs

Lenders in agricultural processing read three things before the forecast: the seed supply agreements, the cake offtake, and the collateral position on the press line. Expeller presses from established manufacturers hold resale value and have an active used market, which is why specifying an Anderson or Farmet machine rather than an unbranded import improves the asset-backed lending conversation.

The UK funding reality

Start Up Loans of up to £25,000 per director at 6% fixed are a working-capital instrument in this sector, not a plant instrument. Nobody builds a mill on them. The practical UK routes are asset finance or hire purchase secured against the press and bottling line, a commercial mortgage or lease on the building, and regional or national growth grants where capital investment creates jobs in a rural economy.

Because seed working capital is lumpy and seasonal, a term loan sized to equipment plus a separate revolving facility sized to one buying window is almost always the right shape on both sides of the Atlantic.

If funding is the binding constraint on your project, our market research and content service builds the evidence base, and the bespoke business plan includes the five-year model and sensitivity tables lenders in this sector expect.

Permits, Food Law and Process Safety by Jurisdiction

Compliance here splits in two: food law, which applies to everyone, and process safety, which applies only if solvent comes on site. Getting that distinction right is worth six to twelve months of timeline.

United States

• FDA Food Facility Registration (FURLS). Any domestic facility manufacturing, processing, packing or holding food for human or animal consumption must register before operations begin, and renew biennially between 1 October and 31 December in even-numbered years. Registration itself is free FDA Food Facility Biennial Registration Fact Sheet. Extraction from oilseeds by pressing, distilling or solvent extraction is a processing activity, so a crush plant registers.
• FSMA Preventive Controls for Human Food. If you must register, the rule applies: updated GMPs, a hazard analysis, and written risk-based preventive controls National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, FSMA guide. Budget $12K–$45K for hazard analysis, PCQI training and the food safety plan.
• OSHA Process Safety Management and EPA air permitting. Triggered by hexane. Published guidance on solvent extraction plant safety is explicit that hexane adds OSHA PSM, EPA air permits and equivalent UK duties Fostechno, solvent extraction safety standards. Budget $25K–$120K and four to twelve months.
• Feed side. If you sell cake as animal feed, state feed registration and AAFCO-conformant labelling apply in addition to anything on the food side.

United Kingdom

• Food business establishment registration with the local authority under retained Regulation (EC) 852/2004, at least 28 days before trading. Registration is free; the HACCP build-out with a competent consultant typically runs £9K–£36K.
• Environmental permit for solvent emission activities. Organic-solvent installations and activities are permitted under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016, with Part A/B banding, Industrial Emissions Directive Chapter V thresholds, emission limits, BAT requirements, monitoring and a solvent management plan LexisNexis UK, EPR 2016 guidance. Determination typically takes around four months.
• DSEAR assessment and COMAH screening. A hexane inventory can bring lower-tier or upper-tier COMAH duties into scope and requires a full DSEAR risk assessment. Budget £20K–£95K for a complete process safety file. Dust from seed handling brings DSEAR and ATEX zoning into scope whether or not you use solvent, which catches a lot of mechanical-only operators by surprise.
• Feed hygiene registration for placing press cake on the market as animal feed. This is a separate regulated activity from selling oil for human consumption. It is the single most commonly missed item in UK crush plans, and it is usually discovered the week the first cake order arrives.

India

India is the clearest regulatory case because the tiering is explicit. An FSSAI licence is mandatory for all edible oil manufacturing, processing, storage, distribution and sale under the Food Safety and Standards Act 2006, and the licence class is set by turnover: Basic Registration below Rs 12 lakh; State Licence from Rs 12 lakh to Rs 20 crore at roughly Rs 2,000–Rs 5,000; Central Licence above Rs 20 crore at Rs 7,500 for five years. AGMARK certification is voluntary for most products but mandatory for edible vegetable oils and fat spreads under FSSAI Regulations 2006, although FSSAI has proposed removing it for multi-source blended oils and suspended it for imports of blended edible vegetable oils USDA FAS, India AGMARK notice.

Canada and the EU

• Canada: a Safe Food for Canadians Licence from CFIA plus a written Preventive Control Plan. Canola crush capacity is expanding quickly, with Cargill's Regina plant adding 1 million tonnes a year of capacity from the second half of 2025.
• EU: Industrial Emissions Directive Chapter V applies to solvent activities above threshold; placing feed materials on the market requires registration under Regulation (EC) 183/2005; oil composition and labelling claims fall under EU food information rules.

The conclusion across all five jurisdictions is the same, and worth stating plainly in the plan: starting mechanical removes the most expensive and slowest-moving block of compliance entirely, and solvent extraction can be added in phase two from cash flow once seed supply and offtake are proven.

Mistakes That Sink Oilseed Processing Plans

Across the crush plans we have reviewed, the same six errors recur — none about writing quality, all about getting the sector's economics wrong on paper.

1. Quoting a profit margin instead of a crush margin

"We expect a healthy 10% net margin" tells the reader nothing, because seed is 80 to 90% of cost of goods. On the Lincolnshire model above, a £40 per tonne move in seed price is £62,400 against a base crush margin of £60,280.

2. Treating press cake as waste

Cake is roughly two thirds of the tonnage leaving a rapeseed press and three quarters of a soybean plant. In the worked model it is 34% of total output value. With USDA projecting soybean meal at $310 per short ton for 2025/26, cake deserves its own contract and its own pricing mechanism. Plans that call it a "by-product" almost always have no buyer for it.

3. Sizing the plant to the equipment quote

Vendors sell capacity; farms supply tonnage. A 20 TPD line needs about 5,200 tonnes of seed a year, which at a 3.7 t/ha UK rapeseed yield implies roughly 1,400 hectares. Size the plant to the catchment you can actually contract, then buy the machine that matches. The reverse order produces an expensive asset running at 40% utilisation.

4. Specifying solvent extraction on day one

Hexane raises oil recovery from roughly 78% to above 97%, which looks like free margin in a spreadsheet. It is not free. It brings OSHA Process Safety Management and EPA air permitting in the US, or an environmental permit plus DSEAR assessment and potential COMAH duties in the UK, at $25K–$120K and six to twelve months.

5. Missing the feed-side registration

Selling oil for human consumption and placing cake on the market as animal feed are two regulated activities, not one. In the UK that means feed hygiene registration alongside food business registration; in the US it means state feed registration and conformant labelling.

6. Modelling a flat price line

Reported crush margins went from squeezed enough to idle plants to a three-year high within months as soyoil rallied with crude oil. Show at minimum a downside case where the crush margin is negative, and explain what the business does for the two quarters that lasts: slow the line, switch to toll crushing, or sit on cover.

What the operators who got it right actually did

Three UK businesses solved the same problem the same way. Hillfarm Oils in Suffolk — the Fairs family, farming since 1967 — became the first UK farm to grow, press and bottle its own cold-pressed rapeseed oil in 2004. Farrington Oils, run by Duncan Farrington MBE near Hargrave in Northamptonshire, built Mellow Yellow as Britain's original seed-to-bottle producer and reached twenty years in 2025. Borderfields, founded in 2005 by farmers on both sides of the Scottish border, became the UK's leading cold-pressed rapeseed brand. None tried to out-crush ADM; all three integrated to the bottle and competed on provenance.

Crush-Room Vocabulary Your Plan Should Use Correctly

Using these terms accurately is a credibility signal. Using them loosely tells a sector-literate reader the plan was written from the outside.

• Crush margin — the value of oil plus meal produced minus the cost of the seed crushed, stated per tonne or per bushel. The governing number in any oilseed processing business.
• Expeller pressing — continuous mechanical extraction through a screw press, no chemical solvent, recovering roughly 75 to 80% of available oil.
• Cold pressing — expeller pressing held below a defined temperature so the oil qualifies for a cold-pressed or extra virgin claim.
• Solvent extraction — dissolving residual oil out of the cake with hexane, lifting recovery above 97% at the cost of process-safety and permitting duties.
• Press cake / meal — the protein-rich solid residue after oil removal, traded on protein specification into animal feed.
• FFA (free fatty acid) — a measure of oil degradation that determines whether crude oil meets food, feed or fuel specification. Written into every offtake contract.
• Oil extraction rate (OER) — tonnes of oil recovered per tonne of seed crushed; roughly 0.424 for canola on a recent three-year average.
• Toll crushing — pressing a third party's seed for a fee per tonne, with the customer retaining the oil and the cake. Converts price risk into service revenue.
• Basis — the gap between the local cash price for seed and the futures price. The main procurement risk for a regional mill and the thing a seed buyer is actually paid to manage.

Sample Business Plan Preview

These mockups show the structure and financial output a buyer receives, built from the crush-margin assumptions used throughout this page.

What's in the Template

Every Avvale business plan template includes these sections, pre-structured for your industry:

• Executive Summary — Your business at a glance, written to hook investors in 60 seconds
• Company Overview — Legal structure, ownership, location, and founding story
• Industry Analysis — Market size, growth trends, and the regulatory position
• Customer Analysis — Target demographics, pain points, and spending patterns
• Competitor Analysis — Local competitive mapping and your differentiation strategy
• Marketing Plan — Channels, messaging, and customer acquisition strategy
• Operations Plan — Day-to-day workflows, staffing structure, and key milestones
• Management Team — Founder bios, advisory board, and key hires planned

For oilseed processing specifically, the structure carries three prompts a generic template does not: a crush-margin table at three seed prices, a seed catchment calculation converting throughput into hectares at local yield, and a split of the oil forecast between bulk and bottled revenue.

The optional Financial Forecast add-on (included in our $300/£250 and $1,000/£800 packages) provides a 5-year Excel model with income statement, cash flow, balance sheet, break-even analysis, and startup capital requirements. Start from the free business plan template if you want to see the structure before buying, or compare against the vegetable oil processing business plan template if your plant is further downstream.

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