Squeezing the oil from a seed or nut leaves a de-oiled solid material called press cake or press meal. This is a valuable commodity and it’s not always the by-product, sometimes the cake is the primary product and the oil is secondary.
Take as an example hemp seed. Of course hemp seed oil is a valuable and very healthy oil but the original hemp seed contains not only oil but protein, fiber and other minerals, vitamins and a little water too. Let’s use an oil press to remove most of the oil from the seed. Now, since no protein came out with the oil, all of it must still be in the remaining solid material – the press cake. This means the protein content of the cake is now higher than it was in the original seed. We have made a concentrated vegetable protein. Of course this applies to other seeds and nuts too, remove the oil from flax, soybean, almonds, sesame etc. and we make a useful and often delicious source of high protein vegetable based food.
OK let’s look and this press cake again. If we can also remove some of the fiber then the protein percentage goes up even further and better still, since the fiber can often be gritty, we will improve the fineness and softness of cake which can be milled into a flour or protein powder.
Markets for non-meat protein are growing as well as specialist markets for high protein powders for use in sports nutrition and energy bar formulation.
Seed2Oil have presses for removing oil from seed and equipment for converting cake into high protein flours and powders.