Crushing-grade sesame: oil content, FFA and what they cost you.

What is crushing-grade sesame?

Crushing grade is natural, unhulled white sesame bought at around 98% purity and specified on oil content and free fatty acid rather than on colour or uniformity. It is the same seed a tahini maker buys, held to a different set of the same parameters, because the mill is going to press it rather than display it.

That is the whole distinction, and it decides the price. Everything a food buyer pays extra for — colour sorting, hulling, tight admixture on appearance grounds — is spend a crusher recovers nothing from.

Why do crushers buy natural white rather than sortex?

Because colour sorting buys an appearance that the press destroys. Sortex-finished seed is fine-cleaned and optically sorted to 99.95% purity for buyers whose seed is visible in the finished product — bakery topping, premium tahini, seasoning. A crusher's finished product is oil and cake, and neither carries the appearance forward.

The same logic sends hulled seed to bakeries rather than mills. Hulling removes the seed coat, and the seed coat is part of what you are pressing. Paying to remove mass before crushing it is the wrong direction.

So the useful conversation with a mill starts at the 98% natural white grade and moves on quickly to oil, FFA and moisture. If a supplier opens by offering a crusher its sortex grade, that supplier is quoting from a price list rather than reading the enquiry.

How much oil is in Nigerian sesame?

Our natural white grade is specified at 48 to 52% oil content, which is the range Nigerian central-belt and northern seed runs in. On a 26 MT container at the midpoint of that range, the seed contains roughly 13 tonnes of oil.

The word doing the work in that sentence is contains. Oil content is an analytical figure for how much oil is present in the seed. It is not a yield, and treating the two as the same number is the most common arithmetic error in a crushing enquiry.

What oil yield should a crusher expect per tonne?

Less than the oil content, by an amount your own plant decides. Oil content sets the ceiling; the extraction route determines how much of that ceiling you reach and how much stays in the cake.

We are not going to publish an efficiency figure for your mill, because it is not ours to publish. A single-pass expeller, a double-press line and a solvent-extraction plant recover materially different fractions of the same seed, and the residual oil left in the cake is both a real loss and, for many mills, a saleable product in its own right. Run the number against your own recovery rate:

1. 01Start from the contracted oil content, not the typical one — specify it as a minimum, so the figure is a floor rather than an expectation
2. 02Apply your plant's own recovery rate for that seed and press configuration
3. 03Deduct the non-seed fraction: admixture yields no oil but does occupy the contract weight
4. 04Value the cake at its own protein and residual-oil specification rather than treating it as a by-product
5. 05Only then compare origins on a landed-cost-per-tonne-of-oil basis, which is the only comparison that means anything

Why does FFA matter more to a crusher than to a food buyer?

Because a crusher pays for it twice. Free fatty acid is the fraction of the oil that has already broken down from triglyceride into loose fatty acid, and alkali refining removes it — every point of FFA is neutralised into soapstock, so it leaves as refining loss rather than as saleable oil, and it consumes reagent and refining time on the way out.

For a food buyer FFA is mostly a shelf-life and flavour signal. For a mill it is a direct, calculable deduction from the yield calculated in the section above. That is why our natural white grade is specified at 2.0% max on the oil, and why a crushing enquiry should treat that figure as a contract parameter rather than a footnote.

It is also the parameter most worth tightening by agreement. If your refining economics need a lower ceiling than 2.0%, say so at the enquiry rather than after the analysis, because it is a sourcing and handling decision at origin, not something that can be corrected in a warehouse at destination.

What makes FFA rise before the seed reaches you?

Time, moisture and damage, in that order — and all three are decided at origin, months before the parcel is offered to you.

Sesame arrives from the farm with moisture that has to come down before storage. Seed that is bagged damp, or dried slowly because the harvest caught late rain, breaks down faster than seed dried promptly. Damaged and immature seed breaks down faster than sound seed. Warehouse time adds to it, and warehouse time in a warm climate adds more.

This is why the crushing conversation is really a sourcing conversation. A specification can state an FFA ceiling, but nothing in a specification can lower the FFA of a lot that was already made in a wet field and a slow dry. Moisture is checked at the point of aggregation, before a lot reaches a warehouse, precisely because that is the last moment the number can still be influenced.

What does admixture actually cost a crusher?

It costs the full landed price of whatever is not sesame, and it yields nothing. Admixture is stone, stalk, dust and other seed — mass you buy at seed price, pay freight and insurance on, clear through customs, and then remove at your own plant before it can be pressed.

The arithmetic is worth doing once, because it is larger than it looks at container scale:

Should a crusher pay for the 99% grade?

Sometimes, and it is an arithmetic question rather than a quality one. The 99% grade halves the admixture ceiling from 2.0% to 1.0%. Whether that is worth the difference in price depends on your landed cost per tonne, your cleaning capacity and what your line does with the screenings.

A mill with its own pre-cleaning and a use for the screenings may be better off buying the 98% grade and cleaning it. A mill paying high freight and duty into a landlocked plant is buying tonnes of stone at a considerable cost per kilogram. Work it against your own numbers rather than against a rule of thumb, and specify the grade the arithmetic chooses.

Which Nigerian regions grow oil-grade sesame?

The north — Jigawa and Kano — is where the oil-grade crop sits, while the central belt of Nasarawa, Benue and Taraba grows the whitest, most uniform food-grade seed. Nigeria's crop is large enough that both descriptions are true at once, and the split matters to a crusher because it is the difference between buying the seed the market prices on appearance and buying the seed priced closer to what a mill actually values.

We buy at the farm gate across both, through our own network of local buying agents, with moisture and admixture checked at aggregation. For a crushing enquiry that origin split is the first thing to state, because it changes which lots we go looking for.

How should a crusher write the specification?

State the parameters in the order they cost you money, and make each one a contract figure rather than a preference:

1. 01Oil content as a minimum, not a range — a range is a ceiling you will not be held to
2. 02FFA as a maximum on the oil, with the analysis basis named
3. 03Moisture as a maximum, remembering it travels and can rise in a container
4. 04Purity and admixture, chosen by the arithmetic above rather than by habit
5. 05Aflatoxin to your destination's limit, named by the regulation that sets it
6. 06Which analysis binds and where it is drawn — at loading or at discharge, and by whom
7. 07Incoterm with a named port and the rules edition, and the container size the parcel loads in

How much sesame fits in a container?

Nineteen tonnes in a 20ft and twenty-six in a 40ft, in 50 kg polypropylene bags. Crushers buy the largest parcels in this trade, so the 40ft is almost always the right unit: fewer bills of lading, fewer terminal handlings and a better freight rate per tonne.

The two sizes are limited by different things, which is why the larger is not double the smaller. Bagged sesame stows at roughly 1.7 to 1.8 m³ per tonne, so a 20ft fills its cube while still under its payload, and a 40ft has cube to spare and stops instead at the ISO weight ceiling. Confirm the road weight limit at your destination before the packing list is fixed, since some routes cap a 40ft lower.

How current is this page?

The specification figures on this page are our published natural white grade and are the same numbers that appear on the product page and in the container calculator. If they move, they move in one place. The container loadabilities are ours for 50 kg bags and are not a general industry figure.

One number is deliberately absent. We have not published an oil recovery or extraction efficiency figure, because that belongs to your plant and press configuration rather than to the seed, and a supplier quoting your yield back at you is quoting something it cannot know. The arithmetic framework is here instead, which is the part we can stand behind.

Nothing on this page describes a certification we hold or a shipment we have completed. Where a destination limit is involved — aflatoxin above all — the governing figure is your market's, and the regulation that sets it is named in our compliance guide rather than paraphrased here.