How is Organic Virgin Coconut Oil different than Refined Coconut Oil?
These two types of coconut oil are actually quite different, and it’s important to know the exact differences before choosing one over the other. Depending on what you’re using the oil for, you’ll usually find that one will fit your purposes much better than the other.
As a quick review, they’re different in a number of different ways:
For easy comparison, here’s a list of the characteristics of each of the oils and how they differ from each other. Below, we’re going to go into each of the ways that they are different in more detail.
When most people think of refining, they have a terrible process in mind — but it’s actually pretty natural. It uses high heat (often steam) and a natural earthen bleaching clay that the oil passes through before it is filtered. If you’d like to learn more about the refining process, read What Does RBD Mean, In Relation To Bulk Oils?
The refining process is a high heat system that uses hot steam and filtering. This process makes refined coconut oil more consistent, and also filters out solid particles of coconut. Refined coconut oil is off-white with a slightly yellow tint (yes, I know this is the opposite of what you expected -- me too!) and when it’s in its solid state, it is consistent throughout.
Virgin coconut oil is less consistent throughout, but in comparison to RBD coconut oil it is a very bright white. In addition, you’ll often find small coconut particles that actually come from the coconut meat.
Because Virgin Coconut Oil is not refined, a lot of the natural coconut flavor is left in the oil.
On the flip side, the refined coconut oil is refined using high heat and a lot of the coconut flavor is taken out of the oil. This is ideal for snack and savory foods that want to use coconut oil for the health benefits and marketing, but don’t want their chips to taste like coconut.
Virgin Coconut Oil is produced from the fresh meat of the coconut. This meat is usually dried and preserved before being turned into oil or it may be “wet milled”. Wet milling is when coconut meat is immediately pressed into coconut milk, and then the oil is separated out of that milk.
Refined coconut oils, in contrast, are produced from the copra of the coconut. The copra is the dried meat of the coconut that has been removed from the shell and is dried or smoked and saved for longer periods of time for future use.
The copra meat is similar to olive pomace — it is more of a lower-quality commodity itself, while the fresh meat is more expensive and has to be freshly preserved to be expeller pressed soon after.
If it doesn’t use a traditional expeller press method, it will use a comparable centrifuge method which spins the oil out (like with Extra Virgin Olive Oil) or a natural method called “settling”. These are are cold pressed methods that don’t use any heat and nothing is added to make the oil — it is just physically taken out.
On the flip side, most RBD oils that are made from the coconut copra are solvent expelled, like Olive Pomace Oil, RBD Soybean or RBD Canola Oil. There are, however, some refined coconut oils that are expeller pressed, but they are more rare.
You can safely assume that unless “expeller pressed” is called out in the title or description of the oil, it is probably a solvent expelled oil.
It has a more complex production process, and it’s produced from a more high quality coconut meat. So it stands to reason that the Organic Virgin Coconut Oil will be much more expensive.
These two types of coconut oil will be very different once in use in your product, so it’s important to do a thorough comparison before choosing one over the other.