Food and Agro-processing Profiles

Abstract

Edible oil is the major element of our meals and every person makes use of various edible oils .in his/her food every day in one or the other form. Although oil industry has made quite a lot lof progress around the world, there are very few oil mills in Lao PDR, which use modern machinery, use a clean environment and are packaged and sold hygienically. Though Oilseeds ,are available in abundance in Laos, still large quantities of edible oils are being imported from foreign countries. One main reason could be that the produced oilseeds are not suitably! utilized in the country till date. That is because the oil extracted out of the processed oilseeds, by traditional techniques is not very efficient and productive. Further, the process involves a lot of drudgery and is slow dndcumbersome. In the past the process was used within ·household and for the households. The oil produced within a household was use for captive consumption. Hence there was no oil available for selling on large scale. With the modern Expeller technology, fast efficient and hygienic ways of mass-producing oil has been introduced. It is to be noted that not only the investment in the expeller unit is low but also ,the quantity of oil processed out of the oilseeds is much higher through this technique. The !Ilow cost, with high yields and quality, supported by market demands because of more and imore people preferring to buy oil rather than make it, oil mill project has become a high ipotential project for Lao PDR.