Process of Cashewnuts.

From a small flower to a wonderful product and many opportunities. But how does the process work? Where does it start and where does it end? The whole process of the cashew nut starts with the trees spread out through Mozambique. The main areas are situated in the northern part, namely in the provinces Nampula and Cabo Delgado. There are also significant opportunities in other areas of Mozambique, but the focus of our group and the cashew industry is mainly in the north. The cashew business in Mozambique is a very important source of income for a lot of people in the rural areas.

Step 1 - Picking

The course of action starts with the rural population picking the cashew nuts and the cashew apples. The cashew trees grow in the wild and belong to nobody in particular. Everybody can go out and pick the product.

One of the main issues at the moment is that the rural population already start picking the cashews in a too early stage. This means that people are gathering the nuts from the trees, whereas they should wait for the product until it falls on the ground. When you take a closer look at the picture you see that there are quite some premature nuts in the bucket of the lady. The green nuts are premature (actually picked from the tree, not falling on the ground) and the grey ones with the yellow or red apples are mature (fallen naturally). As the cashew is one of their few sources of income they want to earn the money as soon as possible. Unfortunately, they do not understand that they will earn more money for a superior product.

Step 2 - Buying posts

After the people collected the cashews, they bring the product to the so-called buying posts. These buying post are buying raw cashew nuts for one of the factories The focus is on quality, a premium will be paid As good quality means a better throughput in the processing cycle.

This would imply that they will buy most of the product in the second season, whereas during bad crops they have to buy in the first season as well. The season is divided in two parts, which they call the first and the second crop. The first season starts at the beginning of October all the way through to the first week of November. During this period you can buy quite some nice product, but there is a lot of bad quality in the market as well. The second crop normally brings a very good quality nut, which is perfectly suitable for processing.

As you can see on the picture are the cashew nuts packed in big jute bags. These bags weigh 80 kilograms (175 pounds) each.

Step 3 - transport to the factory

When there is enough product at the buying post, the next step is to transport the raw nuts to the storage of the factories.

Step 4 - Storage at the factory

After the transport from the buying post to the factory, the goods will be stored in warehouses close to or at the same complex as the factory. This is necessary as transporting during the rainy season is impossible.

Step 5 - Processing

When the product went through all the previous steps, the real work finally starts for the factories. There are 6 steps to take to go through the whole process, which I have mentioned below:

• a. Boiling and steaming
• b. Cutting
• c. Drying
• d. Peeling
• e. Selection
• f. Packing
• g. Storage

First of all the raw material needs to go to the boiling and steaming stage. This process is needed to loosen the shell from the nut. After that they put the cashews in a place to cool down, so it can be used the next day.
After the boiling and steaming stage the cooled down cashews are distributed over the cutting tables, where they remove the hard shell from the kernel leaving a small peel behind.

After the shell is removed from the kernel, there is a period where the product needs to be dried to make it easier to remove the skin in the next phase. The drying, in total, takes around 24 hours.

Than the most difficult section of the whole process, the peeling department. People are removing the skin of the kernel.
After the peeling section, the product will be moved to the selection department. Before that happens there already is a rough selection. Wholes and pieces are separated already.

The final stage of processing is packing. On the picture you see that they use a machine to remove the dust before it goes into the mall for vacuum packing. The product is packed in a carton. Each carton contains two plastic vacuum bags of 25 lbs (11.34kg). This results in a nett weigh of 50 lbs for every carton. After that they will store this wonderful Mozambican product for export.