Cashew nuts: Extraction

The nut that grows outside its own fruit

The cashew tree grows in hot, seasonally dry tropics, often on poor soils. Its kidney-shaped nut hangs below a fleshy cashew apple. Farmers gather fallen fruit, twist off the nuts and sun-dry them. The shell holds a caustic liquid, so kernels must be steamed or roasted, cracked and peeled, by hand or machine, before sale. This is slow work, and the kernel is only a minor part of the raw nut's weight. The shell liquid is a by-product used in resins and brake linings. Trees take a few years to bear, then produce for decades.

Cashew is a tropical tree crop grown mostly by smallholders in West and East Africa, India, Vietnam, Cambodia and Brazil. The tradeable form of the farm product is the dried raw cashew nut in its shell. The kernel sits inside a hard shell full of caustic oil, so processing is labour-intensive: steaming or roasting, shelling, drying, peeling and grading. India's processing industry in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Goa relies on manual shelling and imported nuts. Vietnam has mechanised and became the largest exporter. Processors judge RCN by its outturn, the pounds of kernel per 80 kg bag.

Methods compared

How each method works

Farmers harvest fallen nuts in the first half of the year, dry them and sell to buying agents at a government-set farmgate price in Côte d'Ivoire, or through warehouse-receipt auctions in Tanzania. Most nuts are exported raw.

Low-input cash crop for millions of farmers, but most value added is captured abroad and policy shifts (export levies, local-processing mandates) disrupt flows.

Farmers on the west and east coasts (Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa) and in southern Vietnam sell RCN to local processors.

Feeds domestic processors, but ageing trees keep Indian yields low.

Nuts are steam-cooked, shelled by hand-and-foot cutters, dried in ovens (borma), peeled by hand and graded. Labour-intensive units employ mainly women workers in Kollam, Mangaluru, Panruti and Goa.

High whole-kernel yields and quality, but high labour cost and dependence on imported nuts.

Factories use automatic shelling and peeling machines and import most of their nuts from Africa and Cambodia.

Scale and low labour cost, but thin margins and heavy dependence on imported nuts.

Who does it: global

Who does it: India

India is the second-largest RCN grower (0.79 Mt in 2024, FAOSTAT) and a large importer of raw nuts (12.47 lakh t in CY2024), sourcing about 40-42% from Tanzania, Togo and Guinea-Bissau and about 12% from Côte d'Ivoire. It is now the largest kernel consumer, with exports down to about 0.4 lakh t a year (APEDA).