Cashing in on our cashews

Tanzania is one of the biggest producers of cashews in Africa yet with around 90 per cent of the crop exported in its low-priced, raw form for processing and retailing abroad much of the lucrative revenue potential crop escapes the country. However, with its seeds (yes, cashews are seed, not a nut) grown in the rich soil around Mtwara and shelled and roasted at a processing plant on Zanzibar Island, Tanzanian brand More Than Cashews has built an inclusive value chain. Co-founder Fahad Awadh reveals why the company’s single origin products benefit local farmers, the country, the planet and anyone lucky enough to taste the naturally delicious results.

Fahad Awadh is nuts about cashews and, yes, he does know they are actually seeds. In fact, there is very little he does not know about them. His research ahead of setting up YYTZ Agro-Processing, a fully automated cashew processing plant in Zanzibar, was exhaustive.

The most shocking fact the company’s chief cashew officer and co-founder unearthed was that despite Tanzania being the fourth largest producer of cashews in the world, 90 per cent of its product is exported – “straight from the trees”, as Awadh puts it – to countries such as Vietnam and India with the final roasted and ready-to-eat version reaching a European and US market often unaware they are munching on Tanzanian cashews.

“The situation was there was no idea of the true origin of the cashews,’ says Awadh. “I knew I had to address this opaque supply chain if I wanted to appeal to discerning, millennial customers in European and US markets to whom traceability is important. They want to know where the product came from and they want to know it was ethically sourced and the producer was well looked after.”

Awadh knows exactly where his cashews in his More Than Cashew range come from. He’s built the business around a group of smallholder farmers and women’s groups in the Mtwara region. They get a secure market to sell at best prices as well as YYTZ-provided training on food safety, budgeting and good agricultural practices while Awadh gets some of the best cashews in the country.

Customers get to trace the connection from farm to packet thanks to an ingenious bit of technology, the first of its kind in the world, designed by a start-up in the Netherlands. Each More Than Cashew pack has a QR code which, once scanned by your smartphone, reveals the name of the farmer whose land the cashews were picked from as well as a brief description of the farm. It even lets the customer thank the farmer for their work.

Competing in export market

The state-of-the-art blockchain technology is part of the packaging across the three-strong More Than Cashews range – Dry Roasted With Sea Salt, Plain Dry Roasted and Raw Unroasted. The glutenfree, single-origin products are all vacuum packed for freshness within in an aluminium inner barrier.

With his fully automated processing plant in an industrial centre just outside Stone Town Awadh, who runs YYTZ with his former pilot father Ali, is able to produce at a rate and standard that allows the company to compete in the export market. A team of 20 staff monitor machines that do the cashew drying, grading, screening and roasting before packaging them for sale. The only part of the cashew processing not done in the plant is the shelling, which is taken care of by the smallholder farmers.

Their work rate has, however, also been boosted with machinery. A woman in the farms will typically shell 40 kilos a day, yet YYTZ has invested in semi-automated shelling machines for its smallholders that increase individual capacity to 600 kilos a day.

YYTZ has also ensured it is positioned to benefit from the latest scientific advances in cashew production. As well as its cashew plantations, Mtwara is home to a research institute, which has recently created a hybrid cashew of superior flavour, size, colour and processability. YYTZ has bought thousands of the hybrid seeds and is giving them free to farmers in the Itigi District in Singida, which the institute has highlighted as having the perfect growing conditions for cashews. A cashew nursery has been set up with more than 70,000 trees planted since 2018, many of which have already started producing the nuts in small quantities. The expected high yields in the next few years should cement YYTZ’s status as major cashew products exporter.

Processing plant

While Mtwara and Singida are prominent cashew producing areas, Zanzibar is definitely not. In fact, no cashews are grown commercially on the island at all. Still Awadh is convinced he made the right decision to base his processing plant at the Amaan Industrial Park. In an effort to revive the ageing business park, YYTZ and many other businesses have been offered benefits such as three years free rent, help with building improvements and duty-free import of raw materials by the welcoming Zanzibar Investment Promotion Authority.

Then there is its proximity to Zanzibar’s efficient port and cargo ferry with trucks of shelled cashews coming straight to the processing plant. The port is also the first stage on the shipping route to Awadh’s main buyer in the Netherlands, where the bags of roasted cashews are distributed to outlets in Europe and Canada, including healthy supermarket chain Whole Foods.

YYTZ products are also being made available in the domestic market with luxury hotel the Hyatt Regency Dar es Salaam among its clients. Three retailers in Kenya have also agreed to sell YYTZ products.

Duty of care

Awadh, who admits he even dreams of cashews, is experimenting with more potential products with cashew milk, cheese and butter in the testing stages. Awadh is a disarmingly creative CEO – his designs for a T-shirt company cooked up with two of his friends while still at university in Canada were so good, they were modelled at fashion shows and were bought across the world – and very hands on. “I want to understand everything myself,” he says.

He is not your average entrepreneur. He meditates every morning and before we get down to our cashew chat, he talks knowledgeably about the ancient philosophy of stoicism and how it helps him deal with the ups and downs of running his own company.

However, doing business is in his blood. His childhood makes Bill Gates look like a late bloomer. As a talented pupil aged 11 in Toronto, Canada, he was selected to attend a full-time business school with subjects such as entrepreneurship and technology added to the syllabus. “It got me thinking in a different way,” he says. He created his first product at age 12 – a range of scented candles, rolled and decorated by himself, of course – which sold out at the district school board’s trade fair. It was an early example of Awadh knowing his audience – primarily female teachers – who he knew would swoon over the candles.

Now, Awadh knows the exacting standards of the audience he is aiming for with his responsibly sourced and premium-grade cashews.

The sustainability is far more than a gimmick. There is a real duty of care between YYTZ and its farmers and Awadh will measure progress as much on their success as his own. “I want to be proud of what I do,” he says. “I’ve never just wanted to be successful. If you see the farmers and they’re still in the same place then I haven’t done anything.”

FIVE FACTS ABOUT CASHEWS

1. Nuts or seeds? Cashews aren’t nuts. They are the seeds of the cashew apple.

2. Skins The cashew’s seed lining contains a powerful irritant called anacardic acid (which is why they are never served or sold in their skins).

3. Heart shape The botanical name Anacardium refers to the shape of the fruit, which looks like an inverted heart. It is formed from the Greek ana “upwards” and kardia “heart”).

4. Origin They come from Brazil (unlike Brazil nuts, which are mostly found in Bolivia). Portuguese sailors planted them in Goa, India, in the late 1500s and from there they spread through Asia and Africa.

5. Healthy Cashews are very nutritious and are packed with protein and essential minerals including copper, calcium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc.

PLANET-FRIENDLY SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT

Having 90 per cent of the cashew nuts produced in Africa exported raw in the shell to be processed in India and Vietnam before being re-exported to Europe and North America is an unsustainable practice that has a huge impact on the environment. Cashews with the shell are quite bulky – around four to five kg of raw cashew nuts are required to produce one kg of cashew kernels. This means that transporting containers full of raw cashew nuts halfway around the world has a four-to-fivefold greater impact on the environment. The More Than Cashews seed-to-shop model is a far more sustainable and planet-friendly alternative.