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Argan oil is extracted from the kernels of argan fruits that have been sun-dried for either a few days or up to several weeks. The influence of the fruit drying time on the quantity, quality, and preservation of solvent-extracted argan oil was compared with press-extracted argan oil. Quantitatively, the time necessary for efficient fruit peeling and the amount of extracted oil were determined with regard to the fruit drying time (0 to 28 days). Argan oil quality was studied using, as markers, moisture content, specific extinction, acid index, peroxide index, fatty acid composition, and Rancimat oxidative stability. Oil from fresh fruit presents a high moisture content, high acidity and peroxide values, and short shelf life. Ten to fourteen days of sun-drying is optimum to obtain high quality argan oil.

Deforestation is an important matter for the argan forest whose preservation necessitates planting trees. Macroscopic parameters are urgently needed to identify trees presenting good potential as oil producers. This study demonstrates that argan oil produced from kernels of apiculate fruit is richer in d-tocopherol, whereas oil produced from spherical fruit is richer in linoleic acid, and that produced from fusiform fruit is richer in oleic acid. Therefore, the use of fruit-form as a marker could permit an easy organic production of "naturally enriched" oils.

Phenolic compounds extracted from cactus seed oil were identified for the first time by HPLC-ESI-qToF-MS and subsequently quantified by HPLC-DAD. A total of 7 compounds were identified, vanillin, syringaldehyde, and ferulaldehyde were found to be the most abundant ones. The effect of geographical origin and roasting process of cactus seeds was evaluated. Differences between different locations were not found, however the roasting process had a significant effect on the amount of phenolic compounds. The amount of syringaldehyde, p-coumaric acid, p-coumaric acid ethyl ester, and ferulaldehyde increased during the roasting process. Nevertheless, the concentration of vanillin was not influenced by roasting. It was demonstrated that the increase of those compounds was due to the thermal degradation of lignin from the seeds during the roasting process of seeds.

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