Essential oils & personal care
Indonesian kaffir lime oil
Kaffir lime, jeruk purut in Indonesian, yields two entirely different oils. Leaf oil is steam distilled and carries the fresh green character used in flavour and fragrance. Peel oil is expressed from the fruit and is sharper and more citrus. Buyers routinely order one and mean the other.
How it leaves the country.
- Leaf oil
- Steam distilled from the distinctive double leaves. The larger trade, and the one flavour houses usually mean.
- Peel oil
- Cold expressed or distilled from the knobbly fruit rind. Sharper, more conventionally citrus, and produced in smaller quantity.
- Redistilled
- Rectified for consistency and colour, at a higher price. Worth it where a formulation has to reproduce exactly.
- Dried leaf
- Not an oil at all, and a real export in its own right to the food trade. Confirm which you are buying.
How it is graded.
There is no grade table. The oil is contracted against a compositional profile, and the first decision is which of the two oils you are actually buying.
- Name the plant part
- Leaf or peel, written into the purchase order. This is the most common and most expensive mistake on the product.
- Gas chromatography on the shipped lot
- The profile is what you are buying. An origin name and a supplier's word do not establish it, and the test is cheap against a drum.
- Village distillation varies
- Small stills, non-standard equipment and seasonal leaf mean genuine batch-to-batch variation. Redistillation is what removes it and it costs more.
- Adulteration with citronella
- Cheaper citrus and grass oils share compounds with kaffir lime leaf oil, which is exactly why they get blended in. The chromatogram is the defence.
- Colour and clarity
- Crude oil carries plant material and iron from the still. Filtration and redistillation change appearance and price.
How it is packed.
- Lined steel or aluminium drums
- Essential oils attack unlined steel and pick up iron. The lining is part of the specification and not a detail.
- Full drums, headspace minimised
- Oxygen degrades citrus oils faster than almost anything else. A part-filled drum arrives worse than it left.
- Cool and dark in transit
- Heat cycling in a container ages citrus oil measurably. Stowage matters and it is worth specifying.
- Dangerous goods for air
- Many essential oils are classified for air transport and need a declaration and a carrier who accepts them.1
Where it grows.
East Java
Java
Village distillation alongside the wider essential oil trade, with the best container access in the country.
West Java
Java
Growing and distilling close to Jakarta, serving both flavour and fragrance buyers.
North Sumatra
Sumatra
Cultivation and distillation feeding exporters through Medan and Belawan.
Who buys this.
Documentation, where applicable.
- Certificate of analysis
- Gas chromatography on the shipped lot, plus refractive index and specific gravity. The document the oil is actually bought on.
- Safety data sheet
- Required by industrial buyers and by carriers, and it decides how the drum may travel.1
- REACH registration
- For European buyers the obligation sits with the importer or an appointed representative.1
- Certificate of origin
- Which form applies depends on the destination and the preference scheme in force with Indonesia.
Questions buyers ask.
Leaf oil or peel oil?
Leaf if you want the green, slightly soapy character that a Thai or Indonesian dish carries, which is what most flavour buyers mean. Peel if you want a sharp citrus top note. They come from the same tree and they are not substitutes, and ordering by the name alone is how buyers receive the wrong drum.
How do I protect against adulteration?
Chromatography on the shipped lot against a retained sample. Citrus and grass oils share compounds with kaffir lime leaf oil, which makes blending easy and detection straightforward if you actually test. On a high-value oil in small volume the test is trivial against the value of a drum.
Why do batches differ so much?
Village distillation with non-standard equipment, and leaf that varies with season and handling. It is a feature of the origin. Redistilled material is more consistent and costs more, and for a formulation that has to reproduce exactly it is usually the cheaper choice overall.
What does your service cost?
Five per cent of the order value, paid by you and never by the factory. A factory audit starts at $250 depending on location. We work with orders from $10,000 per shipment.
Worth reading.
Tell us what you need.
Give us the specification and the destination port. We come back with producer options and an indicative price. Our fee is 5 % of the order value, paid by you and never by the factory.
Sources
- 1REACH registration and the only representative. European Chemicals Agency. Checked 3 August 2026.