Extracting the nut from its shell is labour-intensive and requires a skilled workforce, of which 90% are women who are paid meager salaries. After harvest, the shells are roasted and dried to facilitate the extraction of the nut. Removing the nut from the shell is the most difficult step in processing. After you harvest cashew nuts, you may want to store them until you have a decent quantity, since processing them is a bit difficult.
The edible flesh of the cashew tree is surrounded by a shell and a very dangerous caustic liquid related to poison ivy.
Cashew
peels are attached to the underside of the cashew apple, which form completely during the dry season. When it comes to harvesting cashew nuts, they are twisted and removed from apples, usually by hand. If they are very ripe, the nuts will peel off and fall to the ground.Cashew nuts are usually harvested in tropical locations, such as Brazil or parts of Africa, and then shipped overseas for processing. Asia, particularly Vietnam, has been a popular place in the past. However, Vietnam has historically used forced labor to process cashew nuts. Beyond the Nut harvests and processes cashew nuts at its headquarters in Benin, West Africa, to empower local workers and reduce the additional carbon footprint of shipping to a third place.
The cashew nut is botanically recognized as an accessory fruit (or false fruit), which differs from the real fruit in the sense that it is not produced by the plant's ovary. While this can be done very safely, the unfortunate truth is that many cashew nut companies do not take appropriate precautions and many workers have skin rashes and burns due to the handling of toxic cashew nut shells. If you are doing something else to cashew nuts, such as roasting them to give them more flavor (such as honey) or changing the shape to pieces of raw cashew nuts or halves of cashew nuts, this will be done before packaging. Roasting cashew nuts at a high temperature removes this compound and allows the cashew shells to open, making the edible nut accessible.
The edible flesh of the cashew nut is surrounded by a thick shell that is a potent source of a toxic and potentially deadly compound called anacardic acid. While the cashew apple is edible and has a distinctly sweet flavor, it also has a fragile skin that makes it extremely perishable and very difficult to transport. When it comes to cashew nuts, most people would probably say that they are picked from some type of plant and then packaged and delivered as a final product, such as chunks of raw cashew nuts. Cashew nuts, which grow in the tropics, bloom and bear fruit in winter or in the dry season, producing a nut that is much more than a nut and must be handled with care.
However, the process of bringing cashew nuts to the table is lengthy and can even be dangerous at some stages, especially when companies do not follow ethical guidelines or operate under fair trade rules. Cashew cultivation begins with the cashew tree (anacardium occidentale), which produces the cashew tree, attached to the branch, and the cashew seed, attached to the apple. The fruit, called cashew, isn't really a fruit, but is actually the swollen end of the stem just above the cashew. The cashew harvest can take place about two months after the fruit has set, when the apple takes on a pink or red hue and the nut turns gray.
Beyond the Nut complies with fair trade regulations that ensure that workers have the appropriate training and safety equipment when preparing cashew nuts.