Blackcurrant Seed: The Seed Itself, Not the Oil Pressed From It
Search for blackcurrant seed and you will be shown two entirely different products under one name. One is a packet of seed for sowing, sold by nurseries. The other is the tiny seed inside the berry itself — the thing left behind when blackcurrants are pressed for juice, and the thing blackcurrant seed oil is pressed from. Neither result explains the other, and the two answers pull in opposite directions. This article deals with the seed as an object: what it physically is, where it comes from in industrial quantities, whether you can eat it, and what actually happens if you try to grow a blackcurrant bush from one.
Sidr & Stone does not sell blackcurrant seed or blackcurrant seed oil. For our own product, a single cold-pressed Nigella sativa oil, see our cold-pressed Ethiopian black seed oil.
The Short Answer
- Blackcurrant is Ribes nigrum L., family Grossulariaceae, order Saxifragales — published by Linnaeus in Species Plantarum in 1753 and listed as an accepted species by Kew’s Plants of the World Online.
- The seed is very small. Published work on seed recovered from juice pomace gives a thousand-seed weight of 1.17 g — a little over a milligram each — and puts the seed at roughly 5% of the berry’s mass.
- Industrially, the seed is a by-product of juicing, not a crop in its own right. It is recovered from dried pomace, where it makes up a little over half the dry weight.
- The volumes are real. In Poland alone, more than 70,000 tonnes of blackcurrants go to juice manufacturing each year, which implies several thousand tonnes of seed a year from one country.
- You already eat blackcurrant seeds, whenever you eat the whole fruit or a seedy jam. Blackcurrant is not in the rose family and carries no amygdalin; the nitrile compounds it does contain are of a type reported not to release cyanide on digestion.
- Growing from seed works, but it does not give you the bush on the packet. Named cultivars do not come true from seed, which is why every blackcurrant sold by a nursery is a rooted cutting.
- How much oil a blackcurrant seed yields depends almost entirely on how you extract it — from 12.9% by cold pressing to 27–33% by solvent extraction in published measurements of the same material.
Blackcurrant Seed: Two Different Things Under One Name
“Blackcurrant seed” means two things. In horticulture it means seed for sowing, sold in packets of a hundred or so and requiring months of cold before it will germinate. In the food and cosmetics trade it means the small hard seed recovered from pressed berries, dried and sold by the tonne as the raw material for blackcurrant seed oil. Same seed, entirely different commerce.
The reason the two never meet is that they sit at opposite ends of the plant’s commercial life. Nobody presses oil from seed sold for sowing, and nobody sows seed recovered from a juice press. What follows deals with both, because a search for the phrase returns both and neither half is much use without the other.
What a Blackcurrant Seed Actually Is
A blackcurrant berry is not seedless. Each fruit holds a scatter of small seeds suspended in the pulp, each one under about two millimetres long, with a hard lignified coat. They are the reason blackcurrant jam has texture, and the reason blackcurrant pomace is difficult to mill: published work on berry residues notes that the seeds resist particle-size reduction and pass through the gut intact.
The best measured figures come from food-science work on seed recovered from Polish juice pomace, published by Kiełtyka-Dadasiewicz and colleagues in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences in 2025 (PMID 41515920). Milled blackcurrant seed is dark — the darkest of the three berry seeds they compared, and the only one whose red hue exceeded its yellow.
| Property | Reported figure | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Accepted species | Ribes nigrum L., Grossulariaceae, order Saxifragales | Kew, Plants of the World Online |
| Seed length | Under about 2 mm | Published seed morphology of the genus |
| Thousand-seed weight | 1.17 g | Kiełtyka-Dadasiewicz et al., 2025 |
| Share of berry mass | Roughly 5% | As summarised in the same paper |
| Share of dried pomace | About 55% of dry weight | Struck et al., 2016, reviewing earlier Polish work |
| Protein, dry basis | 20.6% | Kiełtyka-Dadasiewicz et al., 2025 |
| Total dietary fibre, dry basis | 53.1% | Kiełtyka-Dadasiewicz et al., 2025 |
| Oil content of the seed | 12.9% cold-pressed; about 21% by supercritical CO2; 27–33% by solvent extraction | Wójciak et al., 2022; Bakowska-Barczak et al., 2009 |
That last row is the one worth pausing on, and we will come back to it.
Where the Seed Comes From: A By-Product of the Juice Press
Almost no blackcurrant is grown for its seed. Europe accounts for very nearly all of the world’s blackcurrant production, and the great majority of it goes into juice, cordial and preserves. In Poland — one of the largest producers — more than 70,000 tonnes a year, a little over half the national crop, is directed to juice manufacturing. The seed is what is left over.
The process is mechanical and unglamorous. Berries are crushed to a mash, warmed, often treated with a depectinising enzyme, then pressed. The juice goes on; the pomace — skins, seeds and a small fraction of stem, at somewhere between 73% and 81% moisture as it leaves the press — is what remains. If it is going to be used rather than composted, it is dried down to around 5% moisture, milled, and sieved, and the seed fraction is separated dry at that point. That separated seed is what oil pressers buy.
| Stage | What happens | Rough figure |
|---|---|---|
| Pressing | Crushed berries pressed for juice; pomace left behind | Pomace around 24% of berry mass |
| Pomace | Skins, seeds and stems, wet | 73–81% moisture as pressed |
| Drying and milling | Dried, ground, then sieved into fractions | Dried to roughly 5–6% moisture |
| Seed separation | Seed fraction screened out of the dried powder | Seed is about 55% of dried pomace |
| Oil extraction | Cold pressing, supercritical CO2, or solvent | 12.9% to 33% of seed weight, depending on method |
Working those figures through gives roughly 7 to 16 kilograms of seed oil per tonne of fresh blackcurrants, depending entirely on extraction method. That is our own arithmetic from the published numbers above rather than a figure anyone has reported directly, and it should be read as an order of magnitude, not a specification. The point it makes is sound regardless: blackcurrant seed oil is a thin stream off a large fruit crop, and its availability tracks the juice industry rather than any demand for the oil.
For what the resulting oil contains, how its gamma-linolenic acid figure is arrived at and how to judge a bottle, see our article on blackcurrant seed oil; for what the human trials measured, see black currant seed oil benefits, and for the skin-specific evidence, black currant seed oil for skin. This article deliberately does not repeat any of that ground.
Wójciak and colleagues, writing in Molecules in 2022 (PMID 36557810), put the case for the seed plainly — it is, in their words, a by-product regarded as unwanted waste, cheap and easy to obtain precisely because it is a nuisance to the people producing it. Their work found that even the residue left after the oil is taken still carries measurable quercetin and kaempferol glycosides and phenolic acids.
Can You Eat Blackcurrant Seeds?
You already have. Every whole blackcurrant, every seedy blackcurrant jam and every unstrained cordial contains them. The question people are usually asking is a narrower one: is there anything in the seed that should not be swallowed?
The reflex worry comes from apple pips and apricot kernels, which belong to the rose family and contain amygdalin. Blackcurrant is not in that family — Ribes sits in Grossulariaceae, in a different order altogether — and no amygdalin has been reported in it. Blackcurrant seed does contain two unusual nitrile-bearing compounds, nigrumin-5-p-coumarate and nigrumin-5-ferulate, described by Lu, Foo and Wong in Phytochemistry in 2002 (PMID 11830168). These are hydroxynitrile glucosides of a type that Bjarnholt and colleagues, in the same journal in 2008 (PMID 18342345), reported does not release hydrogen cyanide when broken down by the relevant enzymes. That is a chemical distinction, not a food-safety clearance, and it is worth being precise about which one it is.
What has actually been fed to people, deliberately, is the press residue. Helbig and colleagues, in the British Journal of Nutrition in 2009 (PMID 19302719), gave 36 women 250 g a day of bread containing 8% blackcurrant seed press residue for four weeks. Tocopherol concentrations rose in serum and in stool. Other markers moved the other way: faecal-water genotoxicity increased, stool antioxidant capacity fell, and a marker of oxidative DNA damage rose among smokers. The authors’ own conclusion was that eating ground berry seed may not be an advantage. We are reporting that trial because it is the only human feeding study of its kind we could verify, and reporting it accurately means reporting the parts that did not come out well.
There is no toxicology dossier for blackcurrant seed, no EFSA novel food opinion, and no US GRAS notice covering seed meal as a standalone ingredient. Absence of a safety assessment is not the same thing as a clean bill of health, and the two should not be blurred. Eating the seeds in the fruit is ordinary; eating concentrated defatted seed meal by the spoonful is a different proposition on which nobody has done the work.
Growing Blackcurrants from Seed: The Honest Answer
Blackcurrant seed for sowing is widely sold, often labelled with a cultivar name — Ben Hope, Ben Lomond, Titania, Ebony. This is where the honest answer diverges sharply from the packet.
Blackcurrant cultivars are highly heterozygous. ‘Ben Hope’, for instance, came out of the Scottish breeding programme now run by the James Hutton Institute from a cross of Westra with a numbered seedling line. Sow its seed and you get segregating offspring, not more Ben Hope. The Royal Horticultural Society states the general rule plainly — many plants will not come true from seed, which is why vegetative propagation exists for named cultivars — and, for blackcurrants specifically, the RHS gives no seed-raising route at all. Its guidance is hardwood cuttings taken from young, virus-free plants between mid-autumn and winter, and explicitly not from older plants, which may carry virus.
There is a second reason nurseries never use seed. In the UK, clean stock is a certified category: the APHA fruit propagation scheme sets a zero tolerance for blackcurrant reversion virus and the big bud mite that spreads it at Certified grade, and notes that lower grades are inspected for health but not for trueness to type. Certification of that kind is only meaningful for clonal material.
| From seed | From a hardwood cutting | |
|---|---|---|
| True to the named cultivar | No — offspring segregate | Yes — genetically identical |
| Dormancy | Dried seed needs roughly three to four months moist and cold, around 4°C | None |
| Fresh seed straight from the berry | Often germinates in two to three weeks | Not applicable |
| Time to establish | A non-fruiting juvenile year first | Roots in about two to three weeks; plantable in around eight |
| First fruit | Three years or more is the norm across the genus | A light crop the year after planting; a full crop by the third |
| Can carry virus certification | No | Yes |
None of which means sowing blackcurrant seed is pointless. It is how new cultivars are made in the first place — breeders raise seedling populations precisely because seedlings vary. It is simply not how you get a particular bush.
One further wrinkle, if you are reading from North America: Ribes is the alternate host of white pine blister rust, Cronartium ribicola, which cannot complete its life cycle on pine alone. Federal restrictions in the United States were revoked in the mid-1960s and the matter left to individual states, and a number of states — Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Delaware, West Virginia and others — still restrict or prohibit Ribes nigrum specifically. Ohio removed its restrictions in 2021. Check your own state before ordering seed, because the rules genuinely differ and they change.
Three Objections Worth Taking Seriously
“This is a waste stream. Does it really matter what is in it?” It matters because the waste stream is sold at a premium once it becomes oil. A material that is cheap because it is a nuisance to the juice industry is marketed downstream on the strength of a single fatty acid. The gap between what the seed costs and what the oil claims is exactly the space where verification either happens or does not.
“You do not sell blackcurrant anything. Why are you writing this?” Because the questions transfer. We press a seed oil ourselves and we have had to think hard about what a seed actually yields, how extraction method changes the answer, and what a number on a label is worth without a test behind it. We have nothing to sell you here, which is a reasonable reason to trust the account.
“Surely the oil figure is the oil figure.” It is not. The same blackcurrant seed measured by three methods gave 12.9%, about 21% and 27–33%. None of those numbers is wrong; they measure different things. A cold press leaves oil behind that a solvent recovers. That is a useful reminder that a figure without a stated method is not really a figure at all — a point that applies to seed oils generally, and one we make about our own product below.
Why Sidr & Stone
We do not sell blackcurrant seed or blackcurrant seed oil, and we are not about to start. What we do is press one seed oil and publish what an accredited laboratory measured in it — because, as the oil-yield figures above show, a number quoted without a method behind it is close to meaningless.
- Independently verified 2.67% thymoquinone, tested per batch
- Tested by Analytice, an ISO-accredited French laboratory, with a Certificate of Analysis
- Organically grown Ethiopian highland Nigella sativa — chosen after a 36-supplier evaluation
- Cold-pressed below 40°C to protect the heat-sensitive thymoquinone
- 100% pure — a single ingredient, nothing added
- Unrefined, which preserves the oil’s natural integrity
- Bottled in matte black UV-protective glass
- Halal certified
- 10% of profits to charity
- Fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US
We will not tell you Sidr & Stone is the strongest or the purest black seed oil — that is precisely the kind of unmeasured claim this article is sceptical of. What we will say is that our thymoquinone figure is 2.67%, independently verified per batch, and that the method is stated alongside it. If you want the checklist we would apply to anybody’s bottle, ours included, it is in our guide to choosing a quality black seed oil.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a blackcurrant have seeds?
Yes. Each berry holds a scatter of small hard seeds in the pulp, each one under about two millimetres long. They are what give seedy blackcurrant jam its texture, and they are what blackcurrant seed oil is pressed from.
What is blackcurrant seed used for?
Commercially, almost entirely for oil. The seed is recovered from the pomace left after berries are pressed for juice, dried, separated and pressed. For what the resulting oil contains and how to judge a bottle of it, see our article on blackcurrant seed oil.
Can you eat blackcurrant seeds?
You do already, whenever you eat the whole fruit. Blackcurrant is not in the rose family and contains no amygdalin. The one human feeding study we could verify used ground seed press residue in bread and reported mixed results, so eating concentrated seed meal is a different question from eating the fruit.
How many seeds are in a blackcurrant?
No reliable published figure exists for Ribes nigrum specifically. A survey of the genus described the berry as holding anywhere from one to twenty-three seeds. What is measured is the mass: a thousand seeds weigh about 1.17 g.
Can you grow blackcurrants from seed?
You can, but not the cultivar named on the packet. Blackcurrant cultivars are heterozygous and their seedlings segregate. Dried seed also needs roughly three to four months of cold, moist storage before it will germinate.
Why do nurseries use cuttings instead of seed?
Three reasons: cuttings are genetically identical to the parent, they root in weeks rather than needing months of stratification and a juvenile year, and only clonal material can carry the virus-free certification the UK scheme awards.
Is blackcurrant seed the same as a dried currant?
No, and this is a common mix-up. The dried “currants” sold for baking are dried Black Corinth grapes, Vitis vinifera, not Ribes at all. In parts of India the label “black currant” is used for dried black grapes for the same reason.
Is black seed oil a medicine?
No. Black seed oil is a food supplement, not a medicine. It has a long traditional history and an interesting body of research around thymoquinone, and can be a worthwhile part of a healthy routine — but it does not cure diseases and is not a substitute for medical care. Be cautious of any black seed oil marketed with specific disease-cure claims.
Final Thoughts
A blackcurrant seed is a milligram of hard, dark, oily tissue that most of the world throws away. It becomes interesting twice: once when a juice factory has several thousand tonnes of it and has to decide what to do with the stuff, and once when a gardener buys a hundred of them expecting a named bush. Neither of those stories is well served by the search results, which is the reason for writing this.
What runs through both halves is the same discipline. In the field, the honest question is whether this seed will produce the plant on the label — and the answer is no, which is why the trade uses cuttings. In the press house, the honest question is what a stated oil percentage was actually measured by — and the answer changes the number by a factor of two. Specificity about method is what makes a figure mean anything, in horticulture and in oil alike.
That is the standard we try to hold ourselves to. Our cold-pressed Ethiopian black seed oil — pure Nigella sativa, independently verified at 2.67% thymoquinone by an accredited laboratory — is available now, with fulfilment in the UK, EU, and US.
Shop Sidr & Stone Cold-Pressed Ethiopian Black Seed Oil — Verified 2.67% Thymoquinone →
Disclaimer: This article describes published research on blackcurrant seed, horticultural guidance and regulatory positions at the time of writing; figures, guidance and state restrictions may change, and readers should check current sources. Sidr & Stone does not sell blackcurrant seed or blackcurrant seed oil. Black seed oil is a food supplement, not a medicine, and is not a substitute for medical treatment of any condition. For any health concern, consult a qualified medical professional.