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.