our process
We know where our ingredients come from because we make it ourselves.
What Makes us different?
We do the whole process ourselves. From getting the nuts from our farm, to processing the nuts, husking, cracking, dehydrating and pressing the nuts for oil, to purifying and filtering the oil, and then developing our own formulas for skincare, we do it all in-house!
By doing the whole process ourselves, we are able to ensure the quality is consistent, and we can guarantee our customers that what we say is in our products is actually in our products. No filler oils, no unnecessary filler ingredients.
When you buy skincare products from major retailers, do you really know if the oil they use is actually the oil they say they are using? Seriously, how do you know? They don't show you footage of them processing their ingredients. That is intentional. As you learn more about how difficult it is to harvest these ingredients and how little oil actually gets produced during production, it will have you asking the same question we asked: how do we know if any of it is real?
That has been our chief driving question that lead us to be as transparent about our process as possible. Sure, as a new company, our videography can be a little rudimentary. But there is no doubt that our process shows that we make our own oils. You can feel and smell the realness and quality in our products.
Once harvested, macadamia nuts are husked to remove their outer soft shell. This is accomplished using a rotating shaft that is hard enough to break apart the husk, but does not penetrate the hard inner shell.
Macadamia nut husks are nutrient rich with potassion and calcium, making them excellent for mulch.
Our macadamia nuts are dehydrated in a dehydrator on dozens, if not hundreds of trays. Dehydration is necessary to lower their moisture content of the nuts, which maximizes their oil yield during cold-pressing. The nuts can either be air-dryed or put into a dehydrator. Air-dryed nuts take longer to remove moisture and are more susceptible to unpredictable weather and rodents, but it is cheaper. Whereas, using a dehydrator removes moisture much quicker but costs significantly more in electricty.
To optimize cracking the macadamia nuts, they are sorted into different bins based on their size. Then each bin of nuts are cracked at a time. The cracking machine is limited by the size range of nuts it can crack at one time.
The hardness of the macadamia nut shell requires specialized equipment to crack it. In fact, the macadamia nut shell is so incredibly hard that when the cracking machine cracks the shell it literally sounds like a shotgun.
The most labor intensive part of this process is separating the hard shells from the nut itself. We manually sort through all the cracked shells to pull out the nuts. The silver lining in this part is the great conversations that we have together as a family!
We cold-press our macadamia nuts, which produces a sludge-like mixture of oil and sediment. We then allow the sludge to settle for months, allowing the oil and sediment to naturally separate. We then decant the oil and sediment.
Cold-pressing macadamia nuts is not an efficient way to extract oil. However, it saves all the important nutrients for your skin!
We only use mechanical purification and filtration to purify out oils. No chemicals are used. Ever. Our oils are truly cold-pressed and unrefined. You can smell and feel the realness in our oils.
Is this photo staged? of course. Do we actually inspect each vial of oil we make? Absolutely. Without chemical filtration, it is essential that we visually inspect every bit of oil we purify. No sediment. No impurities. Just pure oil.
Once filtered and prepared, each oil is bottled in small batches and carefully packaged by hand to preserve freshness and ensure every detail meets our standards. We track every product we make using batch numbers to control the quality of each batch.
The final step before our products get into the hands of our customers!
We are proud that we designed, curated and brought to life everything we make. From the farm to the package you receive in the mail, we did it all.
You've probably seen us around at different craft fairs and festivals! If not, follow us on Instagram to see when our next events are at! We would love to meet you and share our amazing products that you just learned so much about!
Thank you for joining us on this journey!
