Product knowledge
What Is Olive Pomace Oil?
Olive pomace oil is extracted from pomace — the leftover pulp, skins and pit fragments from the first pressing — using heat and a food-grade solvent rather than mechanical pressing alone. The crude oil that comes out is refined to remove impurities and off-flavours, then usually blended back with a small amount of virgin olive oil to restore some colour and flavour before it's sold. It sits below extra virgin and virgin on the grading ladder, and is priced and used accordingly.
How pomace oil is actually made
After olives are pressed for their first oil, what's left behind — skins, pulp and crushed pits, collectively called pomace — still holds a meaningful amount of oil that mechanical pressing alone can't fully recover. Producers extract that remaining oil using heat and a solvent, commonly hexane, then refine the crude result to strip out impurities, free fatty acids and unwanted flavours the solvent process leaves behind. On its own, refined pomace oil is nearly flavourless, which is why bottlers typically blend in a small percentage of virgin olive oil afterward to give it back some colour and a mild olive character.
Where pomace oil is actually used
Because it's cheaper to produce and has a higher smoke point than virgin grades, pomace oil shows up mainly in high-volume commercial frying and in blended cooking oils rather than on a table or in a salad dressing. It isn't a substitute for extra virgin in anything where flavour matters — dressings, dips, finishing a dish — since that's precisely the character refining strips out.
How it differs from virgin grades
The difference isn't just marketing: virgin and extra virgin oils come only from mechanical pressing, with no solvents or heat-based extraction involved, and extra virgin in particular has to pass both a chemical acidity test and a sensory taste panel. Pomace oil skips both of those — it's a genuinely different production process, not a lesser example of the same one, and honest labelling always names it "olive pomace oil" rather than simply "olive oil." The fuller grading ladder, including where pomace sits relative to refined and virgin oils, is laid out in what olive oil grade names actually mean.
What we stock instead
Levant Direct's olive oil range is Lio Premium Virgin Olive Oil — a virgin-grade, mechanically pressed oil, not a pomace product. A pomace-grade oil for high-volume commercial frying would be sourced on request through our supplier houses rather than pulled from current stock; for what we do carry and how to judge it, see how to judge a good extra virgin olive oil.
Related questions
Is olive pomace oil bad for you?
It's a widely used, regulated commercial cooking oil, not a safety concern — the honest distinction is that it's a different, more processed product from virgin olive oil, extracted with heat and solvent rather than mechanical pressing, and it carries less olive flavour as a result.
Can you use pomace oil for frying?
Yes — it's specifically favoured for high-volume commercial frying because of its higher smoke point and lower cost compared with virgin grades.
Does Levant Direct sell olive pomace oil?
Not in our current visible catalogue. Our stocked olive oil is Lio Premium Virgin, a mechanically pressed virgin grade; a pomace-grade oil would be sourced on request through our supplier houses.