Maker Spotlight: The Magnificent Seed

As fourth generation farmers on Salisbury Plain, Ellie Grant's family have been growing rapeseed for years. A learning moment for her children sparked a business idea and The Magnificent Seed was born.

We caught up with Ellie to find out more about The Magnificent Seed’s bee-friendly cold-pressed oil, and the best ways to use rapeseed oil in cooking. 

What inspired you to get started? 

Our family have been farming Salisbury Plain for four generations – and the farm plays a huge part of our family life. When our children were young, we wanted to show them what happened to the crops we were growing. We bought a small hand-powered press for the rapeseed and loved the oil that came out – it was so much smoother, nuttier and more floral than the oil I had been buying in the supermarket!

We were excited by the oil’s potential to support healthy eating at the same time as taking the flavour of our food up a level, and just over a year later (with the support of an EU Leader Grant), we had set up a small press house at the farm and pressed our first commercial batch. We named our oil after the seed itself, because it’s the magnificent natural taste and nutrition of the rapeseed that we wanted to preserve.

How important is it to you that customers know where their oil has come from?

When we started, traceability and integrity and knowing exactly what you’re buying really mattered to me – and it still does. 

On our website, you can see the field that your bottle came from by looking at the batch number on your bottle. Every drop of oil in each bottle comes from seed grown on our farm. But it’s not just single estate, it’s single field – it’s grown and pressed with care each time. 

Your oil is also very environmentally friendly – can you tell us more about that?

We aim to preserve the natural taste and nutrition of the oil as well as we can, and do that in a way that also preserves the planet where possible. 

Our press house is entirely powered by the farm's solar panels, and our no-till approach to growing the crop helps keep carbon in the soil so we have a very low carbon footprint.

The whole farm is insecticide free, so it’s great for bees. We tend to sow the rapeseed among the previous year’s barley stubble to help hide it from hungry flea beetles.

When we press the seed to get the oil out, we then use the leftover part of the seed on farm – so very little goes to waste. We always allow the oil to settle before we filter, too. As well as giving time for the flavours to meld and allowing a gentler filtration process (which we feel is good for flavour), this helps minimise waste in the filtration process – so a win all round!

Finally, as well as selling bottles of oil, we also sell refill pouches. You can use these to top up your bottle easily, reducing the total amount of packaging used. We’ll then recycle those pouches via Terracycle if you send them back to us. We also sell drums of oil to refill shops, so you can take your own bottle along and top up from those (we then take the drums back, clean and refill them). 

We’re firm believers in using rapeseed oil for roast potatoes, but what’s your top tip for cooking?

Roasted vegetables – there’s something about the oil that brings out the sweetness in roast vegetables that leaves it feeling almost caramelly. It brings up the natural sweetness and I think that’s quite special.

The biggest surprise for me was baking. It wasn’t something I’d really considered before until my neighbour made a cake with the oil and it was absolutely amazing. So now we use it for baking all the time, because it seems to bring some lightness to the cake. You also can use a little less fat with the oil, rather than when you use butter – so you’re using less saturated fat and less fat over all, then there’s a natural lightness and springiness it adds to the cake. 

It’s also beautiful for dressings – a great alternative to olive oil. Some of our customers use it on its own or with just a little salt to dress a salad – but we’ve been collaborating with The Slow Vinegar Company on dressings recipes that have proved very popular.

The high burn point also makes it amazing for Yorkshire puddings. 

Are there any other ways you’ve found customers using it?

One customer says she gives a little to her cat to improve the shine of his coat!

Have you managed to convert customers from olive oil?

We have, actually! Lots of our customers used to be olive oil fanatics, and now they have a dusty old bottle of olive oil in the back of the cupboard they don’t really use any more. 

They say they love the taste and versatility of our oil, but rapeseed oil also has half the saturated fat of olive oil and ten times as much Omega 3. The British Heart Foundation's Senior Dietician says that rapeseed oil has the most ideal balance of Omega 3 to Omega 6 of all the plant oils, reducing the risk of heart and circulatory diseases! So, as well as having a smoother taste and being more versatile, rapeseed oil is healthier.

When I first started the business, 88% of the people I surveyed had olive oil in their kitchen and only 30% of them really knew about rapeseed oil as an alternative. Yet they said taste, health and sustainability were important to them. To me, that felt like a huge growth opportunity. Especially as the cost of our oil is so much lower than that of an equivalent single estate olive oil.

What’s the big difference between a cold-pressed rapeseed oil like yours and the rapeseed oil you might find in the supermarket? 

Some of the oils in the supermarket aren’t cold pressed – they’re heat and chemical processed to try and increase the yield you get from the oil. This makes them taste and smell pretty horrible, so that’s all removed. These are refined oils and they’re a very different product to cold pressed oils – they’re better for high temperature deep frying, but sacrifice the taste and goodness.

Our oil is not only cold pressed, but pressed with a real emphasis of retaining the natural magnificent taste of the seed from field to plate. We don't use desiccants on the crop before harvest. We press slowly, taste checking regularly to make sure the friction of the press isn't warming the oil too much and distorting taste. We settle the oil before filtering (without the accelerants commonly used in the industry), and then we bottle in light protective packaging, as oils quickly oxidise when exposed to light. 

When I started up, I had assumed I would be looking to get our oil into supermarkets, but as time has gone on, I've realised it would be very difficult to get our cost base down enough to do that without sacrificing our process and changing the product that we and our customers love.

Your oil has won several awards – can you tell us about those? 

We won gold in the Taste of the West awards in 2022 and 2023. Last year, we were in the Sauces and Condiments category and were the only rapeseed oil that made it to the finals, so we’re really proud of that one. 

We also were awarded a Great Taste Award in 2021 and 2022, and we got some fantastic comments from the judges for that – “clean and honest on the palate”!

What does joining a scheme like the Wiltshire Marque mean to you?

It presents a really lovely opportunity to build relationships with customers across the county, as well as visitors. I’ve always wanted to better connect with other Wiltshire food producers because there are so many amazing products made here and food and drink is quite a specialist industry. So it’s a great combination of reach and teamwork! 

You can find The Magnificent Seed stocked across the county and can purchase online via their website, with free delivery over £35. To find out more, visit themagnificentseed.co.uk

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