What are the steps involved in cooking oil refining?

Refining crude cooking oil into edible oil is inseparable from cooking oil refining equipment and cooking oil refining process. And the whole cooking oil refining process mainly contains four steps, respectively degumming, deacidification, decolorization, and deodorization. Next, let's learn about each refining steps of cooking oil in detail.

Cooking oil refining process flow chart

Step one: Hydration degumming

Degumming is the removal of phospholipids in crude oil by adding phosphoric acid and water. These impurities will not only damage the stability of oil storage, but also affect subsequent refining steps, so they are removed first.

Step two: Acid-base neutralization to remove free fatty acids

Unrefined crude oil contains free fatty acids, which will make the oil easily rancid, so it needs to be deacidified to remove free fatty acids. Add alkali (sodium hydroxide NaOH) to produce soapstock through the saponification reaction to remove acidic substances in the oil. In addition, the soapstock will also absorb other suspended impurities and remove them.

Degumming and deacidification pot of refining cooking oil

Step three: Adsorbing decoloration

Undecolorized cooking oil is usually dark in color. Adding activated clay or activated carbon to refined cooking oil can effectively remove pigment in oil to achieve the purpose of decolorization of edible oil. Do it like this, one can make the oil sell in line with consumers’ preferences, and the other can extend the shelf life of oil products.

Decolorization pot of refining cooking oil

Step four: High temperature distillation deodorization

Deodorization of edible oil uses high temperature steam distillation to remove odor molecules in oil to achieve deodorization effect.

Deodorization pot of refining cooking oil

After above steps, the final product is refined bleached deodorized cooking oil. But some vegetable oil need more treatment such as dewaxing for sunflower oil, fractionation for palm oil etc.

Henan Glory company has more than 10 years of cooking oil refining equipment manufacturing experience, if you want to build a cooking oil refinery plant, welcome to consult us, our engineers will customize the most suitable scheme for you.