Difference Between Cold Pressed and Wood Pressed Oil

August 21, 2026

What Cold Pressed Means

Cold pressed is a broad category, not a single specific method. It refers to any extraction process that avoids adding external heat, keeping the temperature during pressing below a certain threshold, generally around room temperature or slightly above.

This covers a range of equipment, from small stone or wooden setups to modern steel expellers designed to run without generating much friction heat. What unites all of them is the absence of added heat and chemical solvents, not the specific machine doing the pressing.

What Wood Pressed Means

Wood pressed refers to one particular way of achieving a cold press, using a wooden mortar and pestle setup, often called a kolhu or ghani, that grinds seeds slowly through rotation.

The wood itself matters less than the pace it enforces. A wooden ghani simply cannot rotate as fast as steel machinery without breaking down, so the slower turn becomes a built-in safeguard against heat buildup rather than a deliberate design choice for its own sake.

Are They the Same Thing?

Not exactly. Wood pressed oil is a specific type of cold pressed oil, but not all cold pressed oil is wood pressed.

A steel cold press, run at low speed with proper cooling, also qualifies as cold pressed, since it avoids added heat too. It simply is not wood pressed, because no wood is involved anywhere in the process. Every wood pressed oil can accurately be called cold pressed, but the reverse is not always true.

Key Differences Between the Two

Several practical factors separate the two methods once you get past the shared cold press foundation, and understanding them helps explain the price gap seen on shelves.

Equipment: Cold pressing broadly includes steel expellers, while wood pressing specifically uses a wooden ghani or kolhu
Speed: Steel presses generally run faster than wooden ones, even when both stay within cold press temperature limits
Heat generated: Wood pressing tends to produce even less friction heat than a standard steel cold press, due to its slower pace
Yield: Steel cold pressing typically extracts more oil per batch than wood pressing, which leaves more behind in the pulp
Nutrient retention: Wood pressing often preserves marginally more of an oil’s natural colour, aroma, and antioxidant content, simply because even less heat builds up during extraction

Which One Should You Choose?

For most people, either option beats a refined oil by a wide margin, since both avoid the heat and chemical processing that strips out much of what makes an oil worth using in the first place.

Wood-pressed oil makes sense for anyone prioritising maximum nutrient retention and willing to pay more for it. Cold pressed oil from a well-run steel setup offers a reasonable middle ground, retaining most of the same benefits at a somewhat lower price point. The difference between the two matters less than the difference between either one and a heavily refined bottle.

How to Tell Which Method Was Used

Labels do not always make this obvious, so a few practical checks help:

Genuine wood-pressed oil tends to be darker in colour and stronger in aroma than steel cold-pressed versions of the same oil
Wood pressed oil often costs noticeably more, since production is slower and yields less per batch
A label mentioning kolhu, ghani, or wooden pressing specifically indicates wood pressing rather than a generic steel cold press
When neither term appears clearly, contacting the brand directly is more reliable than guessing from packaging alone

Common Misconceptions Worth Clearing Up

A few assumptions about these terms circulate widely enough to be worth addressing directly.

Cold pressed automatically means wood pressed. This leads buyers to expect the darker colour and stronger aroma typical of wood pressing from any bottle labelled cold pressed. Since steel cold pressing is a legitimate, separate method, this expectation often leads to disappointment with a perfectly genuine product.
Wood pressed is an outdated, inferior technique. This assumption comes from it predating industrial equipment. In practice, the opposite tends to be true for nutrient retention, since the slower pace protects heat-sensitive compounds better than most modern alternatives, even though it sacrifices speed and yield to do so.
Any unrefined oil must be either cold pressed or wood pressed. Some oils undergo partial processing, using moderate heat that falls short of full refining but still exceeds true cold press temperatures. These sit in a grey area that neither label accurately describes, which is exactly why reading beyond a single buzzword matters.

Why This Distinction Matters for Cooking and Skincare

The practical impact of choosing between these two options shows up differently depending on how the oil gets used.

For cooking, particularly at higher temperatures, the gap between cold pressed and wood pressed narrows considerably, since heat from cooking itself eventually breaks down many of the same delicate compounds either method preserves during extraction. A wood-pressed oil used for deep frying loses much of its advantage over a steel cold-pressed equivalent by the time the dish is done.
For applications involving little or no additional heat, such as scalp massage, a finishing drizzle over a salad, or direct skin application, the difference becomes more meaningful. Here, whatever survived the original pressing process is what reaches the skin or the plate, making the extraction method's impact far more direct and noticeable.

The Matrika Approach

Matrika Natural Foods built its process around the traditional wooden kolhu method specifically, rather than settling for a generic cold press claim.

Founded by Vijeta Sharma and Aman Sharma, the brand presses its full range this way, keeping every oil free of added heat and chemical processing from seed to bottle. It also works directly with small farmers to support fair, transparent sourcing, and its products carry FSSAI, GST, and Udyam certification rather than relying on unverified label claims alone.

Conclusion

The short version is simple:

All wood-pressed oil is cold pressed, but not all cold-pressed oil is wood-pressed
Wood pressing is a slower, more traditional method that tends to preserve slightly more of an oil’s natural character
Both options are meaningfully better than refined oil, and the choice between them often comes down to budget and priorities

Neither term guarantees quality on its own, since production practices vary between brands even within the same category. Checking for transparency about the actual process, rather than trusting a single buzzword on a label, remains the more reliable way to judge a bottle.