History & Overview
From ancient time, vegetable oils were obtained by crushing oilseeds in village ghanis / kolhus / chekkus in the country. At the beginning of the 20th century the vegetable oils industry was based on some 500,000 bullock-driven ghanis producing about 800,000 tonnes of oils. Slowly, in addition to these ghanis, power-driven ghanis (rotary ghanis made indigenously) imported expeller and imported hydraulic press plants started crushing oilseeds.
Around this time many European countries and United States of America had established huge solvent extraction plants for recovering directly almost all the available oil in the oilseeds like Cottonseed and Soybean.
On this background, just 2 years before independence, in 1945, a lone small Solvent Extraction Plant commenced operation in Bhavnagar for extracting oil from oilseed cakes and oilseeds. And gradually such units increased. They faced common problems, which brought them together to form an Association with all the 40 units operating at that time, in 1963.
The Association
The Solvent Extractors’ Association of India was formed in 1963 to help and foster the development and growth of Solvent Extraction Industry in India. At present the Association is having 875 members including about 350 working solvent extraction plants having combined oilcake/ oilseed processing annual capacity of about 30 million tonnes.
The Association is an all India body to solvent extractions industry and premier vegetable oil Association in the country having wide representative membership consisting of processors of Rice bran, Oilcakes, Minor Oilseeds and Soybean.
Associate Membership of the Association includes apart from processors, also merchant exporters, oil millers, refiners, vanaspati manufacturers, importers of edible oils, brokers, traders, plant & machinery manufacturers, clearing & forwarding agents, surveyors, regional associations etc.
With such wide cross section of membership, SEA is a broad based, all India apex body of solvent extraction industry and at present practically all working solvent extraction units are its members. The affairs of the Association are being managed by the Managing Committee, headed by the President.
The Association continuously gives feedback to the members about development taking place in the country and world over by various circulars. Monthly News circular, E-Mail & through periodical zonal meetings.
SEA was the first Association in India successfully to launch Website http://www.seaofindia.com to provide upto date information on trade & industry and statistical data backed by its exhaustive data bank. SEA is financially autonomous and functions entirely as private sector body.
SEA – ISO 9001:2015 Certified Organisation
SEA is the first Association in Vegetable Oil & Oilseed sector and may be one of the few Associations / Chambers in India to receive quality standard ISO 9001:2000 registration. The Certification was issued by M/s. Orion Registrar Inc. USA with ANSI-RAB, USA as well as RvA; Netherlands accreditation.