How shea butter is made: A complete guide to shea nut processing

Introduction

The off-white or ivory-coloured fat, shea butter, is obtained from the nuts of the shea tree and occurs in solid form at room temperature. Even in tropical heat, its texture is likely to be something like a creamy paste. The processes ordinarily employed in how shea butter is made yield a white, odourless, and almost tasteless product.

Shea butter is commonly used to make cosmetics because of its moisturising, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antibacterial, and antifungal properties. In some African countries, this edible fat is used to cook, much like people in the West might use butter or lard; on occasion, shea butter is even used in combination with other oils as a cocoa butter substitute.

In this article, we're going to explore how shea butter is made - right from the cultivation of shea nuts to shea butter extraction and how to refine shea butter - so that it can be used to cook food, moisturise skin, and even manufacture chocolate.

Where is shea butter made?

Native to West Africa, shea trees are the source of shea butter. These trees grow wild in the savannah and are found in 21 African countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Sudan, Togo, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, and Guinea.

The question of where is shea butter made is particularly important to African cultures and economies for a few reasons. For starters, it does not require any special attention or care to grow profusely in suitable habitats like the West African savannahs. Two, every part of the tree is useful - while the nut is the source of a useful fat and its fruits and flowers are edible, the bark of the tree is an ingredient in some traditional medicines, and the shell of the nut is said to have mosquito repellent properties. Most importantly, the shea tree is a crucial source of economic sustenance for local communities, especially rural women in countries like Burkina Faso.

In Burkina Faso, shea butter is an important contributor to the economy. Here, shea butter production itself is crucial. Where is shea butter made here, you ask? The Sissili and Ziro provinces are the most important production centres. Further, shea nuts are the country's third most important export after cotton and livestock. Since both shea nuts and shea butter are exported in huge quantities from Burkina Faso, their quality is extremely important. The quality of both products is dependent on post-harvest processing, which may begin with the parboiling of shea nuts to prevent germination or sun-drying.

Burkina Faso and Mali are the principal exporters of dried shea kernels, while the Ghanaian economy also depends on shea exports.

How shea butter is produced?

Let's start at the very beginning. The process of shea butter production begins with the cultivation of the shea tree. In its initial stages, the shea tree is slow to grow; it can take anywhere between 20 and 50 years to start bearing commercial quantities of fruit. But once the tree matures, its useful fruit bearing life span is long, reaching between 20 to 200 years. Due to this extended growth period, most shea butter is produced from naturally growing shea trees rather than shea plantations.

The large plum-resembling fruits that the tree yields contain shea nuts, within which you find the shea kernel, which yields the fat that is shea butter. How shea butter is made traditionally is a tedious, labour-intensive process which takes hours to yield even a single litre of butter. In the Sahel, women visit the trees daily in the months when the fruits are ripening to collect fallen fruits. The fruits are set aside to ferment, after which the seed is removed, washed, and sundried or roasted in an oven or boiled. These seeds are shelled to release the kernels, which are then further processed by crushing or grinding, heating, churning, straining, and kneading. Evidently, this process of how shea butter is produced is highly time and labour-intensive. This, combined with the long maturation time for the tree, also explains why shea butter production has remained a cottage industry with limited size and reliability for so long.

In recent years, however, research and industrial advancements have simplified the process of how shea butter is produced, making the product vastly popular the world over.

Step 1 of how shea butter is made: Sheanut preparation

Seed cleaning and conditioning begins with separating the shea fruit pulp from the nut either by fermentation or manually. Subsequently, the nuts are processed by boiling, roasting, or sun-drying. Boiling in water prevents the shea seeds from germinating and prevents hydrolytic degradation of the extracted shea butter. The boiled shea nuts are sun-dried, and then the dried shea nuts are cracked to obtain the kernels. The kernels, too, are either sun-dried or roasted to eliminate any residual moisture.

Alternatively, the shea nuts can be oven-roasted or smoked to dry them out; however, this method has its risks, like increasing the carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in the extracted shea butter. The shea nuts can also be sun-dried directly without boiling in water. Whichever way the shea nuts are dried, they are subsequently cracked or dehusked to remove the kernels from them. The extracted kernels are also sun-dried.

Step 2: Shea butter extraction

Extraction of shea butter from shea kernels can be done via either water extraction i.e. boiling with water, mechanical extraction, solvent extraction, or a combination of these processes.

The traditional method of how shea butter is made involves water extraction - boiling the shea kernels with water and skimming off the released oils. The commercial process of how shea butter is produced involves a combination of expeller pressing and solvent extraction. Ideally, the prepared shea kernels undergo two rounds of expeller pressing; after this, the cake still has some fat content, which is obtained by solvent extraction. All the extracted fat is then redirected to an oil refinery to make it safe and suitable for human consumption. Meanwhile, the deoiled cake is processed to be used as animal feed or sent to other industries where it may have utility.

Step 3: How to refine shea butter

Crude shea butter obtained from the extraction process undergoes many refining steps. The process of how to refine shea butter begins with pretreatment and bleaching, which is followed by deodorisation and deacidification to obtain refined shea butter. This product then undergoes fractionation to finally yield two shea butter fractions: one stearin fraction and another olein fraction, each of which has slightly different properties and applications.

In recent decades, the shea butter production process has transformed. How shea butter is made traditionally is very different from the commercial processes employed today. Modern machinery and processes have enabled shea butter production at scales large enough to make the product accessible globally. This means that even though shea tree cultivation is limited by the decades-long process, shea nut processing, shea kernel processing, and shea butter production are no longer constrained by geography. This opens up opportunities for oils and fats industry players in various countries and makes shea butter that much more accessible to people worldwide.