"Nigeria processes only 10% of her cashew nuts while the remaining 90% is exported unprocessed into the international market at a low price."
- Dr Tunde Arosayin, National Coordinator - Commodity Association of Nigeria.
Cashew nuts are an excellent source of several minerals and vitamins that are famous for their creamy taste and also a favourite food item around the world. But despite being one of the world’s largest producer of cashew nuts the bulk of Nigeria’s cashew exports are unprocessed due to the lack of sufficient processing facilities in the country, causing an economic shortfall in the industry.
Currently, cashew farmers in Nigeria depend on foreign buyers to buy up their produce due to the lack of sufficient processing facilities in the country. According to Tola Fasheru, the president of Nigeria Cashew Exporters Association, this year, raw cashews nuts worth $300m destinated for Vietnam was delayed for too long at the port, raising concerns over the variability of raw cashew exportation. It was recommended that the long term solution to port delays and other cashew related challenges is for Nigeria to be an exporter of finished products.
At Farmforte we are reinventing Nigeria’s cashew industry by investing in a state of the art processing plant that can process large amounts of cashew at exportation standard. The facility includes machines that will carry out various processes from cleaning of raw cashew nuts to the packaging of edible cashew nuts (kernels). As part of our efforts to increase the nations cashew processing capacity, our processing plant is projected to produce 5000 tons of kernels annually.
Our cashew nuts are sourced from local smallholder farmers in Ogbomosho, Kogi (to name a few). To ensure maximum quality, we make sure that kernel out-turn ration (KOR) is 49 and upwards before purchase. To prevent deterioration the cashews are stored at low humidity level. At the production level, the cashew is heated up, broken, extracted and packaged, ready for consumption.
Farmforte cashew processing initiative is to change the narrative of processing cashew nuts overseas, add value to the entire cashew chain and improve the social-economic development through job creation in Nigeria.
At Farmforte, our focus is on creating innovative solutions to Nigeria’s agriculture challenges.
