our founder's story

When Jin Wang-our founder, moved to New York City from Vancouver in 2009, she missed the oil that she grew up using in her parents’ and grandparents’ kitchens in the Hunan province in China. As a child she would travel into the mountains and her grandmother would take a small sprig of bamboo and make it into a straw to sip sweet Camellia nectar directly from the blossoms of the Camellia tree. She always told Jin about the restorative properties of Camellia nectar.

Fast forward to New York, Jin wondered ‘Why are American cooks insistent on using Olive oil when Camellia oil is so beautifully flavored, and so practical in the kitchen?’ Its healthy properties are well known among Asian natural food enthusiasts and many Asian women apply it directly to their skin as a moisturizer.

Jin decided to team up with Lingrui and because she has know its founders and respected their company philosophy since Lingrui’s inception over 20 years ago. She understands their deep commitment to the people of the region having been brought up themselves in the unchanged small villages where the economic life stems from Camellia oil and subsistence vegetable and rice cultivation. Lingrui has focused their business success on the use of all native plants and herbs sourced locally to create natural medicines popular across China for their restorative properties. Lingrui has been so committed to supporting the subsistence farmers they built the first, and likely only for many years to come, state-of-the-art right sized cold press for Camellia oil production to provide a living wage to the individual family-farmers who work across these mountainsides.