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If you’ve ever looked for a homegrown replacement for the imported olive, canola and palm oils that typically fill grocery store aisles and home kitchens, there’s a small but growing alternative. A network of sustainability enthusiasts is now making oil from a resource native to Pennsylvania, one of the fastest-growing hubs for this production—bitternut hickory trees.
“We have this staple oil crop on the East Coast of North America that no one looks at as oil,” said Brian Nana-Sinkam, head of product at Third Place Processing in Oley, Pennsylvania, which houses presses that extract edible oil from hickory nuts, “and we import all of the oil that we consume.”
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that American vegetable oil imports cost $10.9 billion, making the U.S. the second-largest global market for cooking oils that year. The global industry relies on mass shipping and other environmentally unsound practices, like deforestation abroad. At home, farmers look to herbicides to profitably grow mass-produced oil.
Meanwhile, across the country, bitternut (otherwise known as yellowbud) hickory trees sit largely untapped for their tasty cooking oil potential—save for this growing group of gatherers, farmers, processors, agroforestry experts and tree breeders determined to make hickory oil a pantry staple. To succeed, they’ll have to overcome low public awareness and limited resources. So they’re starting with one nut-gathering event at a time.
On the Hunt for Hickory Nuts
On a cool, sunny day in mid-October, a group of roughly 25 people of all ages gathered around a picnic table covered in a blue cloth bearing Third Place Processing’s logo in a parking lot at the edge of a roadside forest in Oley, about an hour northeast of Lancaster. A lanky man in an orange Kubota hat passes nuts around so everyone will be able to identify them on the forest floor.
“I didn’t expect so many people…so this is a wonderful thing,” the man, Sam Geesaman, orchard lead at nearby Bloom Farm and expert on yellowbud hickory harvest operations, said. He explained that he stashed buckets where people can dump their nuts among the hickories, whose yellow leaves fan out over the parking lot. “I have a feeling everybody’s going to go Easter egg hunt out there and be like, mine, mine, mine…save some for other folks that are behind you. It’s just about the experience today.”
Experience serves as step one to widening public awareness of hickory nuts as a viable Pennsylvania food source. Attendees disperse into the woods, eyes to the ground, picking out brown-green hulls from fallen leaves, dirt and twigs.
“The flavor profile is similar to olive oil,” Nana-Sinkam said of hickory oil. His colleague at Third Place, processing operations director Matt Holt, calls it “buttery and mellow.” Rich in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids (good for brain health and reducing inflammation), hickory nut oil has a high smoke point, ideal for cooking. “But the big thing is that it grows vigorously here,” Nana-Sinkam added. “Once people taste it, they’re like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t know I had this in my backyard.’”
In the sustainability movement, backyard access beats importing, which is currently how U.S. consumers get most of their vegetable oil. In 2024, production of these oils (like palm, rapeseed and olive) relied on 364 million hectares of global cropland, close to 20 percent of the world’s total. The demand has harmed biodiversity (forests in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa have been razed to accommodate palm monocultures), degraded soil health and resulted in significant carbon dioxide and methane emissions.
To encourage foraging for local tree resources in Pennsylvania, the Keystone Tree Crop Cooperative launched in March 2024. That year, the cooperative collected enough hickory nuts to press between five and six gallons of oil, said director Don English. From last year’s harvest, the group made between 50 and 55 gallons of oil. This year, English says the aim is to produce 300. There’s an urgency to scale production fast. “We’re about the only organization that’s doing it,” he said.
One of the cooperative’s goals is to build out “aggregator hubs” across the state, where those who gather nuts can deposit their hauls in exchange for cash or oil for personal use. To facilitate this, the cooperative recently began hosting hickory nut gathering events like the one organized by Third Place (Nana-Sinkam is also a cooperative member).
In Western Pennsylvania, Andrea Ferich, the cooperative’s marketing director, operates an aggregation hub. She recently led a gathering event in Blair County, where she educated attendees about hickory nuts and worked with them to identify groves of yellowbud hickories.
“I was really interested in developing a stepping stone on the way to Pittsburgh,” Ferich said, “and there was already an existing, thriving community around tree crops in the Blair County area.” She spoke at the county’s Pawpaw Festival in September (harvesting time for the pudding-like pawpaw fruits) to summon attendees for the hickory gathering event. Some traveled from Pittsburgh. Ferich said that people find “meaning” in harvesting local nuts through “connecting with community and having a hobby that can help them produce oil or get paid in cash.”
Amish residents of Pennsylvania have shown particular interest harvesting hickory nuts for income or nutrition. “Within the Amish community, word travels really fast,” she said. Though those she met didn’t have a history of pressing yellowbud hickory nuts for oil (they typically use butter and lard for fat), one Amish woman recalled collecting and eating shagbark hickory nuts when she was young. She was “thrilled that there was a return to these nuts,” Ferich said, with which she’d had such an “intimate relationship” growing up.
A “Multi-Cellular Organism”
So far, the Keystone cooperative has relied almost entirely on volunteers. They and Nana-Sinkam, who started Bloom Farm, which grows hickories, in Oley with his brother Sam in 2023, learned quickly that the biggest obstacle to making nut oil at scale is processing.
That led to the brothers to open Third Place earlier this year; it houses four oil presses, one owned by the cooperative. Third Place also owns and operates a nearby feed shop called Horse Shoe Feed & Supply (they’re experimenting with using protein-rich nut oil byproduct as a feed additive). Third Place crushes nuts using a roller mill designed by Levi Geyer, founder of Fancy Twig Farm in Parnell, Iowa, which presses 50 to 100 gallons of hickory nut oil annually, while Jesse Marksohn’s Yellowbud Farm in Massachusetts provides trees grown free of “synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, [and] fungicides…that are common in the nursery trade,” he says.
“This is becoming a multicellular organism,” said Ricky Teigtmeier, an orchard scientist at Kutztown, Pennsylvania’s Rodale Institute, where he works on identifying high-producing nut trees that can help populate orchards. The aim is to foster agricultural systems that can produce sustainable food oil at scale.
In Iowa, Geyer noted how pressing hickory nuts for oil has sustained his farming business in the face of shrinking margins. Most farmers in the U.S. don’t have control over their sales pricing, he explained, nor over the price of materials needed to grow crops. “They’re getting squeezed at both ends,” he said, while he has control over the full hickory nut oil process. “Hickory oil has given me a path to existing as a farmer.”
Still, Geyer can’t price his oil competitively. Given the time and work it takes to produce, he sells it for $240 per gallon, whereas a gallon of olive oil can go for as low $22 wholesale. Third Place plans to sell theirs at an even higher price–$26.99 for a 6.7 ounce bottle–beginning on November 9. The high price, Nana-Sinkam said, is “because we’re wild foraging everything,” and the significant time it takes to press the nuts for oil, as opposed to doing cheaper chemical extractions. Once more mature orchards with hickories have been established within this oil-producing network to take the place of foraging, like at Bloom Farm and Geyer’s farm in Iowa, prices should go down—but that could take several years.
Another challenge to selling hickory nut oil is the lack of public awareness. When Third Place’s Holt was younger, he made a uniquely infused cooking oil for family members. “None of them used it,” he said, “because they were like, it’s so special, when are we ever going to?”
Holt suggested restaurants as a means of spreading the word about more unusual food oils. “Getting it into the hands of chefs that will feature it on a menu,” he said, can be an effective step toward public embrace.
As the sun set over attendees at the Oley gathering event, Nana-Sinkam noted that “events like these are probably a lot of people’s first contact with hickory trees, and the raw nuts.” Gatherers ate barbeque standing next to buckets filled with the nearly 30 pounds of nuts they collected. A woman in her 20s, Emma Smith, said she drives by this spot all the time and never knew the adjacent forest was rich with hickory nuts. Another woman, whose three-year-old son zigzagged between people’s legs, said he kept announcing, “I love finding and picking up nuts.”
No one I spoke with had tried hickory nut oil before today. Everyone enjoyed the taste, which was similar to olive oil—mild, pleasant and significantly less nutty than the hazelnut oil Third Place also brought for attendees to try.
“Have you sampled some of what that oil tastes like?” asked Amanda Funk, the cofounder of a Reading, Pennsylvania Center for Native Knowledge. “That’s how you create these food sovereignty movements where it really matters to people. They’re about environments like this, because you’ve just seen what the benefit [of your labor] is.”
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