Most cooking oil comes from plants, specifically from the seeds or fruit of oilseed crops grown on farms around the world. A smaller share comes from animal fats. Global vegetable oil production is expected to reach about 228 million tons in the 2024/25 season, with just four crops accounting for the vast majority of that output.
The Four Dominant Oil Crops
Palm oil leads global production at roughly 73 million metric tons per year, followed by soybean oil at about 59 million tons, rapeseed (canola) oil at 28 million tons, and sunflower oil at 21 million tons. Together, these four oils make up nearly 80% of the world’s vegetable oil supply. Beyond these big four, significant quantities come from peanuts, coconuts, sesame, and olives.
What separates these crops isn’t just volume but which part of the plant holds the oil. Most cooking oils are extracted from seeds: soybeans, sunflower seeds, rapeseeds, and peanuts all store their fat inside the seed as a concentrated energy reserve for the future plant. Olive oil and avocado oil are different. They come from the fleshy fruit pulp rather than the seed. An avocado kernel contains only about 1% oil, while the pulp holds the vast majority. Palm oil also comes from the fruit of the oil palm tree, not the seed (though a separate product, palm kernel oil, does come from the seed inside the fruit).
How Oil Gets Out of a Seed
There are two basic approaches to pulling oil out of a plant: squeezing it mechanically or dissolving it with a chemical solvent. Many large-scale operations use both in sequence.
Mechanical pressing uses a machine called an expeller, essentially a heavy-duty screw that crushes seeds under intense pressure. The friction and compression force the oil out. “Expeller-pressed” on a label simply means a press did the work. “Cold-pressed” adds a stricter requirement: the oil must be extracted at a temperature below 49°C (about 120°F). Keeping temperatures that low typically means running the press at a slower speed, since faster pressing generates more heat through friction. Cold pressing preserves more of the oil’s natural flavor and color, which is why it’s common for premium olive and avocado oils.
Solvent extraction is how most commodity oils (soybean, canola, sunflower) are produced at industrial scale. The process has three stages. First, seeds are cleaned, cracked, and flattened to expose more surface area. Then the prepared seeds are washed with a petroleum-based solvent that dissolves the oil out of the seed material. After the solvent-and-oil mixture (called miscella) is separated from the solid seed meal, it’s distilled with heat to evaporate the solvent and leave behind crude oil. The leftover defatted meal gets steam-treated to remove any remaining solvent and is typically sold as animal feed. Solvent extraction pulls out more oil than pressing alone, which is why it dominates high-volume production.
Fruit Oils Follow a Different Path
Olive oil and avocado oil share a process that looks more like juicing than seed crushing. The whole fruit is washed, crushed into a paste (pit and all, in the case of olives), and then spun in a centrifuge that separates oil from water and pulp. No chemical solvents are involved in extra-virgin versions. This gentler approach is why fruit-based oils tend to retain stronger flavors, deeper colors, and more of their original nutrients compared to solvent-extracted seed oils.
What Refining Does to the Oil
Crude oil straight from pressing or solvent extraction isn’t what you see on store shelves. It contains pigments, free fatty acids, gums, and compounds that give it a strong taste and smell. Refining transforms it into the neutral, clear oil most people cook with, and the process has three main steps.
First, the crude oil is purified to remove free fatty acids and other impurities. Next, it’s bleached using absorbent materials like clay or activated carbon, which strip out the dark or yellowish color. Finally, deodorization uses high-temperature steam to eliminate any remaining strong tastes and odors, producing a mild, neutral oil. The result is what the industry calls RBD oil: refined, bleached, and deodorized.
This process also changes how the oil performs in the kitchen. Smoke point, the temperature at which oil starts to visibly smoke, depends heavily on how many free fatty acids remain. Refining removes most of them, which is why refined oils can handle higher cooking temperatures. An unrefined oil still contains those acids, and as they break down under heat they produce acrolein, the irritating compound responsible for the smoke. As any oil gets reused, it gradually breaks down and its smoke point drops, which is why deep-frying oil eventually starts smoking at lower temperatures than when it was fresh.
Animal Fats as Cooking Oils
Before vegetable oils became cheap and abundant, animal fats were the primary cooking fats in most cultures, and they’re still widely used. Lard comes from pork fat, tallow from beef or lamb fat, schmaltz from chicken or goose fat, and ghee from butter. The process of turning raw animal fat into a clean cooking fat is called rendering: heating the fat slowly so that water evaporates and blood, connective tissue, and meat solids separate out, leaving pure fat behind. The result is shelf-stable, high in saturated fat, and has a distinctive flavor that many cooks prefer for specific dishes like pie crusts, fried potatoes, or traditional pastries.
Where These Crops Actually Grow
The geography of cooking oil is surprisingly concentrated. Indonesia and Malaysia together produce the bulk of the world’s palm oil, grown on tropical plantations where oil palms thrive year-round. Soybeans come primarily from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina. Canada dominates canola production. Ukraine and Russia are the leading sunflower oil exporters, and the Mediterranean region (especially Spain, Italy, and Greece) produces most of the world’s olive oil.
Palm oil’s dominance has come with significant environmental costs. Oil palm expansion has been a major driver of tropical deforestation, responsible for an estimated 50% of deforestation in Malaysian Borneo, though its impact varies widely by region (roughly 3% in West Africa, for comparison). The crop is also linked to peatland draining and burning in Southeast Asia, which releases large amounts of stored carbon. Certification programs now track sustainably produced palm oil, though debate continues about how effectively they prevent further habitat loss.
The oil in your kitchen, whether it’s a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil or a jug of canola, traces back to a specific crop grown in a specific part of the world, harvested, and processed through one of these extraction methods. The labels “cold-pressed,” “expeller-pressed,” and “refined” describe real differences in how aggressively the oil was extracted and processed, which in turn affects its flavor, color, nutritional profile, and how it behaves when heated.