Nature 4 November 2026 9 min read
Argan oil, from the tree to the bottle: what really happens in between
Argan oil is sold to you in three words: organic, Berber, cold pressed. What nobody mentions is how many hours of work sit inside the bottle in your hand, who did them and what those hours were paid. The argan forest starts half an hour from Essaouira: one of the few places on earth where you can walk an entire supply chain backwards in a single morning. Here is what happens between the tree and the drop, and the four questions worth asking before you pay.
Contents
- A tree that grows nowhere else, and is thinning out
- The goats in the trees: what is real and what is staged
- The argan year, and why your visit does not depend on the season
- From fruit to drop: six steps, and the one that eats the time
- What your bottle actually pays for
- Why a cooperative is not a shop
- Four checks to run before you pay
- What the Essaouira hinterland is testing right now
A tree that grows nowhere else, and is thinning out
The argan, Argania spinosa, of the Sapotaceae family, grows almost exclusively in Morocco.
- Eight to ten metres tall, short gnarled trunk, wide crown, thorny branches: that is the spinosa in the Latin name. It lives 150 to 200 years.
- Its roots reach down 25 metres for water, five times the length of the tree above ground.
- With no absorbent hairs, it feeds only in symbiosis with soil fungi: you do not really plant an argan, you inoculate its roots.
- It needs 7 to 15 years before it bears fruit.
Morocco's 2022 national forest inventory, as cited by ANDZOA, puts the argan forest at roughly 1.05 million hectares, close to 12% of the country's forest area; remote sensing places the actual presence of trees nearer 871,000 hectares. More than 2.5 million people depend on it.
And it is thinning: density down from around 100 trees per hectare to under 30 in the areas studied, a 44.5% drop between 1970 and 2007 across several provinces, roughly 5% of canopy lost between 1987 and 2014, about 51,600 hectares. A morning in the argan forest makes those numbers concrete. The argan forest stretches mainly across Souss-Massa, Marrakech-Safi and Guelmim-Oued Noun: our comparison with Agadir places the two towns on either side of it.
The goats in the trees: what is real and what is staged
Yes, goats do climb argan trees. The fruit attracts them and the behaviour is partly instinctive. No, the goats lined up along the road between Marrakech and Essaouira are not a scene from nature.
- National Geographic investigated the nine herds on that road: animals trained for up to six months, lured with fruit and grain, prodded into position with sticks, placed on wooden platforms, sometimes carried up and put back when they jump down.
- They hold position for three to four hours, and tips run from one to ten dollars a car. Kids are sometimes tied to the trunk so visitors can pose with them.
- Adnan El Aji, a vet in Essaouira quoted in the same investigation, warns about heat stress, dehydration and falls.
- The real scientific argument lies elsewhere. Asma Kamili points out that climbing is natural behaviour and that the stones passed in goat droppings disperse the seed; José Fedriani, an ecologist at Spain's desertification research centre, answers that goats also eat leaves and seedlings, and that with 7 to 15 years before a first crop, herds stop the forest regenerating.
If you are driving in, you will pass them: our guide to the day trip from Marrakech says what on that road is worth stopping for.
The argan year, and why your visit does not depend on the season
Sources do not even agree on the flowering month: March for some, May and June for others. That is the first clue. The argan does not follow an orchard calendar, it follows the rain.
March to June
What the tree is doing: Flowering, white to yellow green blossom
What you can see: Bees, and nothing spectacular
May to August
What the tree is doing: Fruit swelling and ripening
What you can see: Herds in the trees, but the forest is often closed
August and September
What the tree is doing: Collecting fallen fruit from the ground
What you can see: The collective work: this is the only season for it
October to May
What the tree is doing: Depulping, cracking, pressing
What you can see: Workshops in full production
- When the forest is "closed" in spring, that is the agdal: a community closure decided locally, timed to the biology of the tree, alternating closed and open periods for the herds.
- The fruit stores well and the price of argan rises from November to May, so families hold their stock and sell later: pressing never stops.
- So: the harvest is only visible in late summer, a workshop in any month. One more argument for coming off season, and our guide to when to go covers the weather.
From fruit to drop: six steps, and the one that eats the time
Drying and depulping
What it does: Removes pulp from the dried fruit
By hand: With a stone, sitting down
By machine: Depulping machine
Cracking
What it does: Opens the nut: 2 to 3 kernels
By hand: Two stones, one blow per nut
By machine: Nothing reliable, the kernel breaks
Roasting
What it does: Gives the hazelnut taste
By hand: Over a fire, culinary oil only
By machine: Oven
Grinding
What it does: Turns kernels into paste
By hand: Stone mill
By machine: Grinder
Kneading and pressingSeparates the oil
By hand: By hand, with water added
By machine: Cold press, no water
SettlingClarifies the oil
By hand: Several days standing
By machine: Centrifuge
- One litre means roughly 35 kilos of dried fruit and 2.5 kilos of kernels according to the IRD's chapter on the sector, 38 kilos and 2.6 kilos in other accounts.
- Reckon on about eight hours of one woman's work per litre by hand, again from the IRD. Other estimates run to nearly 58 hours per 100 kilos of fruit for 2 to 2.5 litres: the gap depends on what you count.
- Mechanised, the same 100 kilos takes around 13 hours and gives 4 to 6 litres.
- Cracking, though, stays manual everywhere: no machine opens the shell without breaking the kernel. Hence its weight, roughly 40% of a cooperative's production cost against about 20% for an industrial producer.
- Worth knowing when buying: traditional oil, roasted and pressed with water, keeps only six months. A bottle you intend to use all year must be cold pressed. Culinary and cosmetic oil are not made the same way, and our guide to the 12 dishes worth trying says which one ends up on the plate.
Same grammar as the pottery workshop, whose hands-on guide breaks the steps down, and Essaouira, city of artists lists others.
What your bottle actually pays for
This is the one part of the chain a visitor can influence.
- Cracking is paid by the kilo of kernels: 17.5 to 25 dirhams for a private intermediary, 25 to 45 dirhams in a cooperative, according to two studies from 2014 and 2015 cited by the IRD, which notes those rates had barely moved since 2009.
- At 2.5 kilos of kernels a litre, the cracking alone comes to between 44 and 62 dirhams per litre through an intermediary and between 62 and 112 dirhams in a cooperative. That arithmetic is ours, from those ranges: it is neither a selling price nor a current one.
- The rights holders who gather the fruit were getting 3 to 4 dirhams a kilo for fruit and 50 to 60 for kernels in 2015, and each layer of intermediary adds 1 to 2 dirhams a kilo.
- By 2013 private firms accounted for more than 85% of exported argan oil, against 20% of the market in 2008.
Put plainly: the same bottle can pay the woman who cracked the nuts twice as well, and nothing on the label tells you which one you are holding. For the rest, our real price survey of a day here does the arithmetic.
Why a cooperative is not a shop
- 1996: the first women's cooperative with a semi-mechanised process. Before that, oil was made at home.
- 1997 and 1998: Tissaliwine, Ajddigue, Tafyouch. 1999: UCFA, the first union of cooperatives. 2003 to 2009: a European project worth 12 million euros. 2004: Anca brings together more than 60 cooperatives and some 3,000 women. 2011: the trade federation Fimargane is created.
- Counts vary with what you count: around forty actually produce oil according to the French millers' federation, about 250 are registered with the ODCO according to the IRD, many of them dormant, and only some thirty can compete with industrial producers.
- Most members are widows, divorced or single women, because cooperative work is still frowned upon for a married woman in parts of the hinterland.
- The Argane PGI is Morocco's first protected geographical indication, published in the official bulletin on 18 January 2010 and registered with OMPIC on the 25th. Only about 10% of cooperatives carry it, so its absence is not proof of fraud.
- Even the name was contested: the Argane trademark, registered by a French group in the 1980s, was annulled in December 2010, upheld on appeal on 30 January 2013.
That model, women pooling their work to keep its value, is the one behind the solidarity embroidery workshop, whose story we tell here.
Four checks to run before you pay
Smell
What you do: Open the bottle and smell it
What it tells you: Oil cut with sunflower oil smells of almost nothing
Cracking
What you do: Ask to watch a nut being cracked
What it tells you: A cooperative shows you, a reseller changes the subject
Where the kernels came from
What you do: Ask, and listen to the answer
What it tells you: Nuts get mixed in transit and traceability disappears fast
Price
What you do: Weigh it against the hours
What it tells you: Eight hours per litre do not sell for next to nothing
That last line is the most useful: it is the only check that needs no label and no certificate. Buy at the rural souks and village cooperatives rather than medina shop windows, which a guided tour teaches you to read. On the cosmetic side, wellness traditions and a hammam carry it on.
What the Essaouira hinterland is testing right now
Essaouira is not beside the argan forest, it is inside it, and part of the tree's future is being worked out here.
- FAO and ANDZOA are running trials for the European SALAM-MED project inside the Arganeraie Biosphere Reserve, on the Essaouira side.
- One published result: a biodegradable membrane buried under the young plant, a technique called SWRT, improved soil moisture by up to 486% twelve months after transplanting, and raised seedling survival by up to 13%.
- On grazing the ranking is unambiguous: strictly protected trees show the best physiological indicators, agdal areas next, heavily grazed areas last. The agdal is not folklore, it is the compromise that works.
- The stakes are national. The 2021 to 2030 sector programme commits around 3.64 billion dirhams and targets 411,000 hectares rehabilitated, 50,000 hectares planted, 10,000 tonnes of oil produced against 5,300 in 2020, and 5,000 tonnes exported. Exports had climbed from 440 to more than 1,500 tonnes between 2010 and 2019, worth 94 then 314 million dirhams, peaking at 379 million in 2022; they are now expected to reach only 526 tonnes in 2025.
The simplest way to see any of this is to leave town. Our day between sea and land crosses the hinterland, Berber breakfast and producer visits included, 9am to 7pm, 1,400 Dhs per person, from age 5 and two people minimum. For something shorter, the Aïn Lahjer oasis and birdwatching show the same dry ecosystem, and the Sidi M'Barek coastal walk its seaward version, set out in our guide. Get there with a private transfer or a rental car, and a culinary workshop connects the oil back to the table, as do our article and our 12 dishes worth trying. Fit it into three days here, at the slow travel pace that made the town's name in 2026.
A tree that takes fifteen years to fruit, eight hours of work for a litre, and a sector fighting to keep the value with the people who create it. That is what is worth knowing before you open a bottle.
