Walk into the kitchen of almost any restaurant in America and you’ll find the same handful of bottles: canola oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, “vegetable” oil. They’re cheap, neutral-tasting, and ubiquitous. They’re also not what most people think they are.
At E+ROSE, we don’t cook with seed oils. Not in our wraps, not in our salads, not in our dressings, not in any item we prepare across our twelve cafes. The decision is permanent and non-negotiable, and it’s one of the things that most clearly separates how we operate from how almost every other fast-casual kitchen in America operates today.
What seed oils actually are
The term “seed oil” covers a specific category of oils extracted from the seeds of plants — not from the fruit, like olive oil, or the flesh, like avocado oil, or the meat, like coconut oil. The most common are canola (rapeseed), soybean, sunflower, safflower, corn, cottonseed, grapeseed, and rice bran.
What separates them isn’t the source plant. It’s how they’re made. To get oil out of a tiny, dry seed at industrial scale, manufacturers use high-heat pressing, chemical solvents (typically hexane), and multi-stage refining steps that include bleaching and deodorizing. The end product is a clear, flavorless, shelf-stable oil that bears almost no resemblance to anything that ever existed in nature.
The processing problem
The fats in these oils are predominantly polyunsaturated, which means they’re chemically reactive and prone to oxidation. Heat them — in processing, in cooking, or in the back of a restaurant fryer running for 12 hours straight — and they break down into compounds the human body wasn’t designed to encounter at this kind of volume. The research on what this does over time is still developing, but a growing body of work points toward inflammatory effects worth taking seriously.
I’m a dietitian, not an alarmist. I’m not going to tell you that one tablespoon of canola oil is going to harm you. What I will tell you is that the average American is now consuming somewhere between 20 and 30 times more of these oils than humans did just a century ago, mostly invisibly. They’re in salad dressings. They’re in your “healthy” granola bar. They’re in the avocado wrap at the cafe down the street. They’re in almost every restaurant meal you eat that isn’t prepared at home.
What we use instead
The reason most kitchens use seed oils is simple: they’re cheap, neutral, and stable enough at high heat for the kind of volume restaurants run. Removing them means rebuilding your entire kitchen around different fats. Not impossible. Just expensive, and inconvenient. So most restaurants don’t bother.
At E+ROSE, where fat is needed in the kitchen, we use:
- Extra virgin olive oil — for low-heat applications and dressings, sourced from producers we trust.
- Avocado oil — for higher-heat applications and our wraps, which contain it as a structural ingredient.
- Coconut oil — saturated, stable, and traditionally used in many of the cuisines our recipes draw from.
- Whole-food fats — the fats already inside the cashews, almonds, walnuts, seeds, and avocados we cook with. These don’t need to be added; they come built in.
And critically: our smoothies, juices, and bowls contain no added oils whatsoever. The fat in your E+ROSE smoothie is coming from real almonds, real cashews, real seeds — exactly the way nature packaged it.
Why it matters — and why it’s worth caring about
This isn’t a fashion. It’s not a marketing position. We don’t print “seed oil free” on our menu because we think it’ll sell more smoothies. We do it because, as a dietitian who has spent his career thinking about what people put in their bodies, I genuinely believe this is one of the most underappreciated dietary changes a person can make.
You don’t need to be afraid of fat. You need to be thoughtful about the kind of fat, and how it got to your plate.
You don’t need to be afraid of fat. You need to be thoughtful about the kind of fat, and how it got to your plate. Olive oil pressed from olives, avocado oil from avocados, coconut oil from coconuts, butter from grass-fed cows, fat from real nuts and seeds — these are foods humans have been eating for thousands of years. Seed oils, in the form they’re consumed today, are about 100 years old.
That doesn’t make them villains. It makes them an experiment in nutrition that we’ve all been participating in, mostly without our consent or knowledge. At E+ROSE, we decided to opt out.
The next time you’re ordering a meal somewhere — anywhere — ask the question: what oil are you cooking with? If they don’t know, that’s an answer too. And then come see us. We’ll show you the bottles.