From Tree to Treat: The Hidden World of Raw Cashew Nut Origins

Where Do Raw Cashew Nuts Come From?

The cashew tree is native to Brazil, but today almost no raw cashew nuts in the world come from there. Portuguese traders brought the tree to Africa and India in the 16th century, where it thrived so well that these regions now far outproduce Brazil.

Ivory Coast alone produced an estimated 1.5 million tonnes of raw cashews in 2025, more than any other single country on earth, according to Cotton and Cashew Council data reported by Ecofin Agency. Globally, the trade in cashew nuts and kernels generated an estimated $9.5 billion in export sales in 2025, up from $8.7 billion the previous year, according to World's Top Exports, a scale most people wouldn't guess for a snack that started as a wild fruit tree in Brazil.

The World's Major Cashew Producing Regions

The cashew tree needs a tropical climate with a marked dry season to produce fruit well, which restricts its commercial cultivation to a belt roughly 25 to 30° north and south of the equator. Today, production in this belt is concentrated in two regions: West and East Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Commercially grown in some 30 countries, the crop is led by Ivory Coast, India, Vietnam, Benin, and Tanzania, according to the International Nut and Dried Fruit Council.

Africa Produces Most of the World's Raw Cashew Nuts

According to the 2026 Africa cashew market report by Market Data Forecast, West and East Africa account for more than 60% of the world's raw cashew nuts, led by Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Nigeria. In some of these economies, cashew isn't just a crop, it's the backbone of the export economy. Raw cashew nut exports from Guinea-Bissau totaled $219.3 million in 2023, representing 93% of the country's total export earnings, as reported by Ecofin Agency.

Growing the crop and processing it, however, are two different businesses. Africa still processes less than 30% of what it grows, exporting most of its harvest as unshelled raw nuts to Asian processors instead.

How Raw Cashew Nuts Are Grown and Harvested

The cashew nut grows attached to the bottom of the cashew apple, hanging outside it in a hard shell, the opposite of how most nuts grow. When ripe, the nut and apple fall together, and smallholder farmers hand-pick them from the ground.

The nut is separated from the fast-spoiling apple and sun-dried for a few days to reduce its moisture content, stabilizing it for storage and transport. Only once dried does a raw cashew nut become a tradable commodity, ready to be bagged in the industry-standard trading unit, 80kg jute sacks and shipped, still in shell, to processing centers.

The Cashew Production Calendar Across Origins

Harvesting occurs at different times of year, since the dry season falls at different times north and south of the equator. In India, Vietnam, and West Africa, harvesting usually takes place between February and June, peaking in March and April. Harvests in East African and South American origins, such as Tanzania, Mozambique, and Brazil, take place during the other half of the year, specifically October through January, according to harvest data from Cashew Tech. This staggered calendar keeps the global raw nut supply flowing almost year-round.

Why Crop Quality Varies by Origin

Not all raw cashews are equal, and the trade has a specific way to measure that- the Kernel Outturn Ratio (KOR), which measures how many pounds of usable kernel come from an 80kg bag of raw nuts. A KOR of 47–50 lbs is good and receives full commercial prices, 50–54 lbs is excellent and earns a premium, and anything below 43 lbs is usually rejected or heavily discounted, according to Cashew Technology.

However, origin matters here. Indonesian and Tanzanian nuts regularly weigh in over 53 lbs, while Nigerian nuts tend to fall in the 43–49 lbs range. Much of that gap comes down to farming methods; most African smallholders still plant older, seed-propagated trees yielding 200–400 kg per hectare, well below the roughly 2,000 kg per hectare that newer, grafted varieties can produce, according to Market Data Forecast.

What Determines the Price of Raw Cashew Nuts?

KOR is the single biggest determinant of a bag of raw cashews' value; buyers pay directly for the amount of usable kernel they expect to recover, not just for the weight of the bag. Moisture content, nut count per kilogram, and the percentage of defective nuts matter too, and international buyers test samples against these standards before a cargo changes hands.

Once cashews are processed into kernels, quality is tracked differently, using size grades such as W240 and W320. W320 alone accounts for roughly 60–70% of all kernel trade and is the grade most commodity price reports reference. The value jump between the two stages is steep: raw cashew nuts typically cost $0.50–$2.00 per kilogram, while processed kernels cost $4–$10 per kilogram, according to market pricing from RegionAlert.

Government policy plays an unusually direct role in the price growers receive. Several major West African producers set a minimum farmgate price each season, a floor below which buyers cannot legally purchase raw nuts from farmers. For the 2025–2026 season, the farmgate price was 400 CFA francs per kilogram in Ivory Coast, 410 CFA francs in Guinea-Bissau, and 385 CFA francs in Burkina Faso, according to the International Cashew Advisory Council. Ivory Coast's price was actually cut 6% from the previous season, reflecting weaker international demand and a brief period of U.S. import tariffs on cashews in late 2025, a reminder that even a floor price still moves with global market conditions; it just moves for a whole country's farmers at once rather than for each grower individually.

From Producing Origins to Processing Centers

Growing raw cashews and processing them into kernels are largely separate industries, run by different countries. India and Vietnam are both major growers in their own right, but according to market research from Tridge, both are also among the world's largest importers of raw cashew nuts, buying African supply to feed processing capacity that far exceeds what they grow domestically.

Vietnam and India are the main buyers of Ivory Coast's exported raw volumes, while Vietnam and the Netherlands are the top two destinations for its processed kernel exports, a chain connecting West African farms to Southeast Asian factories to European or American shelves.

By export value, the world's top five cashew exporters in 2025 were Vietnam, Ivory Coast, Cambodia, India, and the Netherlands, together accounting for more than 70% of global export value, according to World's Top Exports. Growing cashews has nothing to do with the Netherlands' presence on that list, it's a major European distribution and re-export hub. An exporter and a grower are often two entirely different things in this trade.

How the Geography of Cashew Production Is Changing

The change is occurring on both the growing and processing sides. On the growing side, Southeast Asian origins including Cambodia and Indonesia have expanded output rapidly over the past decade. On the processing side, African producing countries are pushing to add more value at home rather than exporting raw nuts and importing back finished kernels. Ivory Coast alone went from fewer than 10 processing plants in 2015 to 37 by 2025, according to Ecofin Agency, a real shift from the earlier model, in which nearly all of Africa's crop left the continent as unprocessed raw nuts.

What the Future Holds for Global Cashew Production

Ivory Coast's government has a clear, stated goal that is to process 50% of its raw cashew harvest domestically by 2030, up from roughly 30% today, according to AllAfrica. That target is backed by investment already on the ground, not just a stated ambition. Domestic processing capacity grew nearly fivefold in under a decade, from about 68,515 tonnes in 2015 to 350,000 tonnes in 2024, according to Accio, and three new agro-industrial zones dedicated to cashew processing are under construction, expected to add 12,000 direct jobs by the end of 2025.

Foreign investors from Singapore, the UAE, and India are funding new processing complexes in the country, and Ivorian authorities are also promoting higher-yield grafted tree varieties to help close the productivity gap with Asian growers, according to AllAfrica. None of this guarantee Africa will soon process most of its own crop, similar targets elsewhere have slipped before but it marks a deliberately funded push to shift where the crop's value gets captured, not just where it's grown.