Essential Oil Extraction Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- 28.3% sits with five filers. The top five assignees combine for 136 of 480 records in scope, but the leader alone holds 54 — a steep drop to the rest of the ranked field.
- Filing kept climbing through 2024. Volume ran from 28 records in 2021 to 31 in 2024, an 11% rise over that span, with a peak of 44 records in 2022.
- Separation and cosmetic-use classes trail the core. B01D separation processes reach 16.7% of records and A61Q cosmetics use just 8.3%, well behind the 49.4% carrying C11B fatty-oils claims.
Filing growth compares 2021 (28 records) with 2024 (31) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 480 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape draws on 480 published records filed or published between 2015 and mid-2026 that combine essential oil extraction or purification language with a named technical route — steam distillation, supercritical extraction, molecular distillation, solvent-residue control, batch-variability handling or adulteration detection. The scope is deliberately process-centred: it captures how oil is pulled out of biomass and cleaned up, not every downstream fragrance or flavor formulation that happens to use an essential oil as an ingredient.
Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the last one to two years in any trend chart understate real filing activity; treat 2025 and 2026 figures as provisional rather than a slowdown.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 480-record set: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend, 2017–2026
Annual filings rose from 17 in 2017 to a peak of 44 in 2022, then continued at a broadly similar level, with 28 records in 2021 and 31 in 2024 — an 11% increase over that three-year window. 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in due to publication lag and should not be read as a decline.
IPC subclass distribution
C11B (fatty oils and waxes production) appears on 49.4% of the 480 records and A61K (medicinal preparations) on 37.1%, confirming that most filings anchor on the extraction process itself or its medicinal end-use. Separation-process claims under B01D (16.7%) and cosmetics-use claims under A61Q (8.3%) are comparatively thin, and because a record can carry multiple classes these shares sum to more than 100% of the record total.
Shares are the percentage of the 480 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Essential Oil Extraction and Purification with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about essential oil extraction and purification and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited records in this set
Integrated lavender essential oil extraction device (AU2021103723A4)
The filing describes an integrated device combining a steam generator, distillation still, condensed-water circulation control, water chiller, condenser and oil-water separator into a single lavender essential oil extraction line, with the condenser positioned on the side of the still body and linked to both the still and the oil-water separator.Filed by Nanjing Institute of Comprehensive Utilization of Wild Plants of All-China Supply and Marketing Cooperative Association, dated 2021-10-21.
View full record| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20090130220A1 | Cosmetic composition having pomace olive oil | 72 |
| 2 | US20080113044A1 | Extracts and Methods Comprising Green Tea Species | 55 |
| 3 | US20110034712A1 | Method of extracting essential oil from biomass wastes and a device thereof | 54 |
| 4 | US20080193573A1 | Extracts and methods comprising curcuma species | 54 |
| 5 | US20080275117A1 | Compositions and Methods Comprising Boswellia Species | 48 |
| 6 | US20040223998A1 | Insect repellent | 37 |
| 7 | US20050187289A1 | Pest control compositions and methods for their use | 36 |
| 8 | CN109609270A | 基于天然低共熔溶剂-微波辅助水蒸气提取香料中精油的方法 | 31 |
| 9 | WO2007109802A2 | Extracts and methods comprising green tea species | 31 |
| 10 | US20060102007A1 | Cold Bubble Distillation Method and Device | 31 |
Citation counts inside a searched corpus favour older records; read them as a signal of past influence on later filings, not of current commercial relevance.
Patent titles are shown in the language they were filed in, not translated, so that each record stays verifiable against the original filing — a translated title will not match in Eureka or in any national register. Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
Put your own technology through the same analysis
Eureka on the web
When you want the answer in the next five minutes.
The agent works the prompt against patents and technical literature, citing every source.
Run your analysis now →MCP server & REST API
When it has to run inside your own pipeline.
Patent search, landscape analysis and assignee resolution as MCP tools. Drop them into any agent framework, or call REST directly.
Browse MCP servers →What the data means for filing strategy
Three read-outs from the concentration, trend and technology figures above.
A leader well ahead of a long tail
The top assignee holds 54 records, more than three-and-a-half times the fifth-place count of 15. Combined, the top five hold 28.3% of all 480 records in scope, and the top ten stretch that to 40.6% — leaving well over half the field to single- or low-volume filers.
Steady rather than surging
Filing volume moved from 28 records in 2021 to 31 in 2024, with a peak of 44 in 2022 in between. That is measured growth, not a rush — useful context for anyone judging whether the space is heating up or cooling off.
Core process claims dominate, use-case claims are thin
C11B fatty-oils production claims sit on almost half the record set while A61Q cosmetics-use claims sit on well under a tenth. Separation-process claims under B01D (16.7%) also lag the process-and-medicinal core formed by C11B and A61K.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to essential oil extraction and purification, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the field is still open
The ranked assignee list runs to 100 companies — the full set the data endpoint returns, not a curated top tier. A handful of co-filing relationships and a leader-plus-long-tail structure define most of the competitive picture.
One filer well ahead of the field
The top-ranked assignee holds 54 records against 15 at fifth place and 9 at tenth — a steep early drop that marks this as a leader-and-long-tail field rather than an evenly matched contest.
Dense co-assignee clusters exist but stay small
Ten co-assignee pairs appear across the dataset, with the strongest three pairs each sharing 17 records among the same small group of individual inventors — a tight cluster rather than a broad collaboration network.
Recent activity has cooled among the historic leaders
None of the most active historic assignees in this set recorded a filing in the latest year, consistent with publication lag but also suggesting fresh filing activity is dispersing toward newer, lower-ranked entrants rather than concentrating further at the top.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| HerbalSci Singapore Pte Ltd | 0 | — |
| Compton Development Ltd | 0 | — |
| SYPERT GEORGE W | 0 | — |
| LI DAN | 0 | — |
| GOW ROBERT T | 0 | — |
| Lotte Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| ALBERTE RANDALL S | 0 | — |
| Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
Where to take this next
The dataset points to specific follow-up questions rather than a single conclusion.
Check freedom-to-operate against the top-ranked cluster
With 28.3% of records held by five assignees, a freedom-to-operate review should start with the leader's claim scope before assuming open ground elsewhere in the field.
Run a claim comparison in EurekaWatch the separation-process and cosmetics-use branches
B01D and A61Q claims trail the core C11B and A61K classes by a wide margin, which is where new filings face the thinnest prior art.
Explore white space in EurekaTrack new entrants below the ranked leaders
Zero recent-year activity among the historic top filers, combined with continued overall filing growth, points to fresh activity among lower-ranked or unranked entrants worth monitoring directly.
Monitor new filers in EurekaCommon questions about this landscape
One assignee leads the ranked field with 54 of the 480 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked filer at 15 and the tenth at 9. The top five assignees combined hold 28.3% of all records, and the top ten reach 40.6%, which leaves a long tail of single- or low-volume filers making up the majority of the ranked field of 100 assignees. This structure is typical of a process technology where a small number of specialist and institutional filers built early positions and a much larger group of smaller players file occasionally around specific plant species or equipment designs.
Filing volume grew from 17 records in 2017 to a peak of 44 in 2022, and comparing 2021 (28 records) to 2024 (31 records) shows an 11% increase over that three-year span. Figures for 2025 and 2026 appear lower, but that reflects the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication rather than an actual drop in activity. Based on the last fully settled year, 2024, the field was still expanding rather than contracting.
The IPC composition shows C11B (fatty oils and waxes production) on 49.4% of the 480 records and A61K (medicinal preparations) on 37.1%, making core extraction process claims and medicinal end-use claims the two largest categories. Separation-process claims under B01D reach 16.7% and therapeutic-activity claims under A61P reach 14.8%, both meaningfully smaller. Because records can carry more than one IPC class, these percentages add up to well over 100% of the total record count, so they describe overlap in claim scope rather than mutually exclusive buckets.
AU2021103723A4 describes an integrated lavender essential oil extraction device that combines a steam generator, distillation still, condensed-water circulation control, water chiller, condenser and oil-water separator into a single assembled line, filed by Nanjing Institute of Comprehensive Utilization of Wild Plants of All-China Supply and Marketing Cooperative Association in October 2021. Its scope is tied to that specific integrated arrangement and component layout rather than to steam distillation as a method in general. Equipment that uses steam distillation with a materially different component arrangement, separation approach or control scheme would need its own claim-by-claim comparison rather than being assumed to fall inside this filing's scope.
The thinnest claim density sits in cosmetics-use applications (A61Q, 8.3% of the 480 records) and in separation-process detail under B01D (16.7%), both well behind the dominant C11B and A61K classes. Molecular distillation, solvent-residue quantification and batch-variability correction are named in the search scope but are not among the heavily claimed classes, suggesting these specific technical routes carry lighter prior art than the extraction core. Recent-year momentum being flat among the historic top filers also points to room for new entrants to stake out these narrower branches before they consolidate.
Research Essential Oil Extraction and Purification in depth with Eureka
Go past this page: query the whole essential oil extraction and purification corpus yourself, in your own scope.
Every answer comes back with patent numbers you can open.
Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.