New product ideas often bring with them special challenges, leading to the generation of unexpected new skills. That has been true of Earthoil’s work to develop, with The Body Shop, a process to produce papaya seed oil. Logistics, location, and production techniques have all provided major challenges, and only determination and patience, have enabled practical solutions to be found.
Earthoil presented to The Body Shop, for assessment, a small collection of oils sourced in Africa – all with strong claims as cosmetic oils, and each with a particular mystique. Of these oils, the one selected for immediate development was papaya seed oil. This oil had not previously been extracted on a commercial scale, and so the task confronting Earthoil was to pursue each step in its commercial development.
Papaya seed oil has appealing properties – its stability, its composition – and it also has a strong marketing angle. Papaya has a ‘good health’ reputation, and as a tropical fruit it has an exotic image. And its commercial development would directly benefit the many small producers of the crop in Africa.
Papaya is widely grown as a source of the enzyme ‘papain’. The enzyme is extracted from the sap of the green papaya. Once the fruit is fully ripened, sap flow ceases and papain can no longer be recovered. The fruit is simply cut from the tree and discarded by the farmers. By encouraging the farmers to remove the seed from this discarded fruit, an additional source of income becomes available to them, and the fruit wastage is at least partially addressed – fitting the ethically responsible policies of The Body Shop, and helping to build a responsible reputation for Earthoil.
However, a measure of the practical difficulty is the large volume of otherwise waste papaya fruit to be handled – something like 250 tons of fruit to produce 1 ton of the oil. To collect and transport seed from such a volume of fruit, and from a very large number of small farms, would be difficult anywhere, but in Africa it was a major undertaking.
In the end – after exploring supply opportunities throughout Kenya – papaya seed used by Earthoil is now sourced mainly from the papain-producing regions of Uganda and the Congo, although a growing supply is coming from food processing outlets in Kenya.
After removal, the seed must be thoroughly washed and quickly dried before being delivered to the Kenya factory for final preparation and pressing. Standard operating procedures have been developed to establish the necessary controls for each of these steps, laboratory testing established to prove the acceptable quality of the seed prior to despatch from the collection areas, and standardised systems developed to permit the movement of the seed across national borders.
It was also necessary to develop both the methods of seed preparation and the pressing techniques to meet the characteristics of papaya seed, and so extensive trials followed. Once a reliable method was established for pressing this difficult seed, orderly production followed, and initial supply of the oil to The Body Shop was at last established.
Looking back, it is hard to remember the intensity of that period of preparation. But in the end the project was completed, and now the papaya seed oil operation is routine. However, it was a period of learning for Earthoil, and the lessons learned have been applied to the development of other projects. And the relationship Earthoil now enjoys with The Body Shop was founded in that very intense development project.
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