Oil Mill ROI Calculator

Will Your Oil Mill Make Money?

Enter your own local numbers — raw material price, oil selling price, cake price — and get monthly gross margin and payback period. We do not preload prices: yours are the only ones that matter. One thing many first-time millers forget: press cake is revenue, often 15–30% of the total.

Reading the result honestly

This is a gross-margin planner, not a business plan: it ignores taxes, financing cost, spoilage and price seasonality. If payback shows under 12 months, your plan has room for those surprises. If it shows 30+ months, improve one of the three levers — buy seed cheaper in season, sell oil branded/retail instead of bulk, or make sure cake revenue is not left on the table.

The three levers, with a worked example

Say a mill processes 1,000 kg of groundnut per day at $0.60/kg seed cost, yields 40% oil selling at $2.20/kg, and sells cake at $0.35/kg over 25 working days. Revenue: 400 kg oil × $2.20 = $880 plus 600 kg cake × $0.35 = $210, so $1,090/day or $27,250/month. Seed costs $15,000/month; with $900 running costs the gross margin is about $11,350. Those numbers are illustrative only — swap in your own — but they show the structure: cake contributed 19% of revenue, and margin swings hardest with seed price.

Lever 1 — seed price: buying in harvest season at even $0.05/kg less adds $1,250/month here; that is why serious mills budget storage working capital, not just machinery. Lever 2 — selling format: bulk crude to traders is the lowest price; filtered and bottled for local retail typically clears meaningfully more per liter, and the filtration equipment often pays for itself on that spread alone. Lever 3 — cake: in groundnut and sunflower regions cake demand from feed mills is steady; leaving it unpriced in your plan understates the whole business.

Costs first-time millers underestimate

Four items sink more first-year plans than machine price ever does: seed working capital (2–3 months of purchases in buying season), consumables (pressing worms and bars wear out — budget a set every 6–12 months depending on throughput and seed abrasiveness), packaging (bottles, caps, labels can rival power costs in retail-oriented mills), and tuning losses in the first weeks while you dial in moisture and roasting — plan for below-target yield in month one. None of these are reasons not to start; all of them belong in the payback math before you commit.

Next steps: size the machine, read the buying guide, and watch the machines run on real seed.

The three levers that move payback

Payback on an oil mill is driven by a small number of levers, and the calculator lets you test each. Seed cost is usually the largest single line, so buying in season and storing — a financing decision — often moves payback more than any equipment choice. Oil selling price depends on channel: branded or retail oil earns far more per litre than bulk crude sold at the gate, which is why the same mill can show very different paybacks depending on how it sells. Utilisation — how much of the mill's capacity actually runs — spreads fixed costs; a press running one shift a week will struggle to pay back regardless of its specification. The table below shows how these levers pull in typical terms.

If the calculator shows 30+ months, work the top two rows before shopping for a cheaper press — the machine price is rarely where payback is won or lost.

Related reading: How to start an oil mill: the full decision chain.

Frequently Asked Questions