Pecan oil starts new life
The Advocate, Baton Rouge, LA                        Date : July 28, 2005

Thomas B. "Tommy" Hatfield of Winnsboro calls his new career -- the launching of a pecan oil business -- "life after lumber."

Hatfield, who was in the hardware and lumber business for 32 years, received the charter for his new business, Kinloch Plantation Products LLC, from the Louisiana Secretary of State's office a year ago in the summer of 2004.

"Our only product is 100% Pure Virgin Pecan Oil, and our first bottling was on Dec. 13 (2004)," he said.

During a recent interview, Hatfield explained his odyssey from lumber to Kinloch Plantation pecan oil, which he markets as "The Healthy Oil for the Everyday Gourmet."

He said he joined his family's Winnsboro business, Hatfield Hardware and Lumber, in 1970. He later added a store in Monroe and purchased Baton Rouge Lumber Co. Between September 2001 and February 2002, he sold the Baton Rouge and Winnsboro businesses and closed the Monroe store.

"After the lumber companies were all gone, I was looking for something to do," Hatfield said. His search began about the same time his doctor warned him he needed to lose weight to lower his cholesterol and blood pressure.

"I concluded if I was going to eat healthy, I have to cook healthy," Hatfield said. He recalled a conversation he had had in the late 1990s with friend June Jackson, a caterer in the Washington, D.C., area. She had pointed out the health benefits of pecans and suggested he develop an oil, "but at the time I was up to my eyeballs in lumber."

Not long after that conversation, his wife, Eleanor, found a French pecan oil in a gourmet food store in Chapel Hill, N.C. She brought one of the crockery bottles home and put it, unopened, in the refrigerator. They forgot about it until early 2004. Although its expiration date read October 1998, the oil was perfectly fine, Hatfield said.

"Vegetable oils go rancid when they are subjected to heat, light and oxygen," he explained. "That pecan oil was in the fridge so it had remained cool, in a crockery bottle so it had no light, and it was never opened. I began cooking with it."

He experimented in his Winnsboro kitchen with the pecan oil and researched its health benefits. Its main benefit, Hatfield said, is that it has only 9.5 percent saturated fat compared to olive oil which has 13.5 percent. It has more than 90 percent unsaturated fatty acids with 50 percent monounsaturated and 40 percent polyunsaturated, Hatfield said.

Within three months, he'd taken off 25 pounds, lowered his blood chemistry and depleted his pecan oil supply.

Hatfield is quick to point out that while using the pecan oil was an asset in his diet, he can't attribute his improved health just to cooking with pecan oil. "It was cooking right and exercising, too."

He searched for more pecan oil and discovered it was expensive, imported and in low supply. He concluded that if he wanted a steady supply, he'd have to make it himself. He threw himself into a six-month study of pecan oil, working with Oklahoma State University's Agricultural Food and Processing Center, where research had been done on extracting oil from pecans.

Funding for the business came from the sale of the lumber business, he said, "and we have a lot of bank financing behind it."

The company's name, Kinloch, is Scottish and "is the name of my wife's family's plantation house which is pictured on the label. It was built in 1859, and it's where we live. It's now in the middle of Winnsboro."

In addition to being low in saturated fat, another benefit of pecan oil is that "it's light and neutral in flavor, unlike olive oil which has a distinct flavor," Hatfield said. "Pecan oil doesn't taste like pecans," which makes it versatile.

"No. 3, it has a high smoke point of 470 degrees. You can stir-fry with it, and it's good for sautéing and braising food."

Millicent Rountree, vice president of sales and marketing for Kinloch Plantation Products, pointed out that pecan oil can be used as a butter substitute. "If you want a butter flavor, just add a pat of butter to the oil, which takes on the flavor of whatever you're cooking."

In explaining how his pecan oil is produced, Hatfield began by explaining how most commercial nut and soybean oils are made. "Almost all commercial oils, including many canola oils, are chemically extracted using petroleum-based distillates." The chemical is forced into the bean (or nut) under pressure to push the oil out. The chemical is then evaporated off, and the oil is filtered and refined, he said.

"My pecan oil is mechanically extracted, with no additives, no preservatives and no chemicals used in the processing," he added.

The particular blend of pecans used in Kinloch Plantation Products' oil is made from a variety of pecans grown from Virginia to California, including Louisiana. Hatfield explained that he purchases his pecans from an accumulator, the middleman to whom growers sell their pecans.

He has the oil extracted in California, "where all the big nut producers are," he said. "There is nobody in Louisiana who extracts nut oil."

"It takes 4 pounds of pecans in the shell to make 16 ounces of pecan oil," he added. "Pecans are about 46 percent oil," he said.

The extracting facility ships the pecan oil in 55-gallon drums to Panola Pepper Corp. in Lake Providence for bottling.

For Kinloch Plantation Products' first (and so far, only) bottling, Hatfield and Rountree joined the Panola crew on the bottling line. "It was like the 'I Love Lucy' episode in the chocolate factory," Rountree laughed. "Everything that could go wrong did."

Hatfield said, "The round bottle equipment didn't like the square bottles" or the cork stoppers.

"Panola was used to hot sauces, round bottles and screw tops," Rountree added.

To complete the bottling process, Hatfield manually put the corks in the bottles, and Rountree used a little plastic mallet to drive down the corks.

"The original deal with Panola was to bottle, label, package and ship," Hatfield said. "But, now they will just do the bottling, and we are doing the labeling, packaging and shipping from a warehouse approved for handling food products in Winnsboro." They apply the labels by hand.

Until recently, the company's staff consisted only of Hatfield and Rountree, but with expanding business, Hatfield recently hired Laura Breedlove to oversee bookkeeping and transportation operations.

Hatfield and Rountree are hopeful the company will have $1 million in sales by the end of the year.

"We are in the educational process," Rountree said. "People don't know what to do with pecan oil. Once they use it, they are hooked.

"A year down the road, we envision having a more flavorful oil, one that would taste like pecan," she added. Another idea is to have an oil made only with Louisiana pecan varieties.

"We are also working on packaging our oil in larger quantities, either a gallon, 3 gallons or 5 gallons, for restaurants," Rountree said, noting that New Orleans restaurateur Dickie Brennan uses it in his home kitchen and has asked his chefs to see how it can be used in his family's restaurants.

Kinloch Plantation Products 100% Pure Virgin Pecan Oil is available in three sizes, 250 milliliters, 500 milliliters and 750 milliliters. Suggested retail prices are $9.95 for the smallest bottle, $14.95 for the medium size and $18.95 for the largest.

"We got into Whole Foods by a buyer calling us after seeing our pecan oil at Martin Wine Cellar in New Orleans," Rountree said.

Their pecan oil also is available in Baton Rouge at Maxwell's Market, Calvin's Bocage Market and both Calandro's supermarkets.

Kinloch Plantation Products' pecan oil may be ordered through the company's Web site at http://www.pecanoil.com, which also provides a list of retail sites in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama and New Mexico. For more information, call (318) 435-1455 or write the company at 1304 Cornell St., P.O. Box 1346, Winnsboro, LA 71295-1346.

Hatfield perhaps hasn't completely gotten lumber out of his system. In discussing the versatility of his product, he said he's been told his pecan oil can be used as a buffing agent on wood furniture to hide scratches.

Above are some recipes to try with the new pecan oil.