The Best Agri Products Processing Cooperative (Bappco) is a busy hive of activity. Six days a week the men and (mostly) women of Bappco are hard at work processing cashews. The amount of attention that they pay to each individual cashew is really impressive. If you’ve ever wondered why cashews are so expensive, read on and discover the steps involved and how Lytefire tech is enabling this cooperative to maximise their profits.
Above, one the trainees, Gina Munleon, long time member of Bappco, adjusts the focal point during our training session. Previously, Bappco depended on tabletop ‘turbo roasters’ powered by electricity. On more than one occasion while I was in their space there were extended blackouts, effectively bottlenecking their production.
In addition to the roaster, our local partner CarbonCycle wanted us to develop a a new application to remove the toxic liquid contained within the shell of the coconut (for more information on that, see the previous blog post). This will help to streamline their production flow and it means that they don’t have to depend as much on outside service providers.
Read on for an overview of the processing performed by the lovely ladies of Bappco.
Sacks of cashew nuts are dropped off and are dumped out to be sorted. Misshapen, mouldy or off-colour nuts are sorted out and discarded. Then the nuts are spread out in the sun for pre-drying.
Next, they are either shipped to another community for fire-frying to extract the cashew nuts shell liquid (CNSL) or they are cracked directly, in which case the ladies must coat their hands and arms in vegetable oil to avoid irritation due to the acidic and toxic nature of the liquid. For cracking/splitting, Bappco has several table mounted nut splitters. Once the nuts are cracked, the kernel is extracted and either peeled or not peeled depending on the desired final product.
Next, the cashews are dried in a big electric drier. Up to 100kg of cashews are dried for 3 hours and then are ready for roasting. Until recently, Bappco would use a tabletop ‘Turbo Roaster’, a 1200w convection roasting chamber. The Turbo roaster can ‘white roast’ 2kg in about 20 minutes and needs to be stirred every 2-3 minutes to ensure even roasting. For lightly browned ‘toasted’ cashews, the process takes 35 minutes for 2 kilos. Our Lytefire toasts twice as fast and can roast beans without using the pre-drier, enabling Bappco to overcome electricity costs!
Next is sifting and sorting, where whole cashews, half cashews and bits and pieces are separated, then weighed and packaged. Each cashew is individually handled 4 times, and are handled in bulk an additional 4 times.
With our technologies in the production line, Bappco can now supply more cashews to their local markets and is making significant savings on electricity. Again, with the help of our local partner CarbonCycle and the University of the Southern Philippines (USTP) we’ll be gathering data and establishing just how much benefit these eco entrepreneurs are having on the environment as well as their bottom line.
