Ivoirienne de Noix de Cajou

INCajou - Ivoirienne de Noix de Cajou is a HACCP certified cashew processing company based in Ivory Coast, with an installed raw nut processing capacity of up to 9.000t per year and a current employee count exceeding 300.

One out of two raw cashew nuts come from Africa, with Ivory Coast being the world’s largest exporter, yet only 10% of cashew kernels are processed on the continent. Traditionally, raw cashew nuts are exported from Africa across the globe to Vietnam and India for processing and shipped back again to Europe and the United States for consumption. This process impacts product quality, dilutes traceability and leaves an undesirable carbon footprint, creating a disjointed market that has privileged pricing over sustainability. INCajou seeks to disrupt this status-quo alongside other budding African processors by breaking the all-too-familiar African cycle of exporting un-beneficiated raw materials.

Our business model consists of buying raw cashew nuts from local farmers, processing them into kernels by employing local youth, primarily women and exporting the kernels to Europe and the United States. We are focused on managing and producing cashew kernel profitably – 9,000t per annum by 2020 and doubling to 18,000t by 2021, while ensuring world-class operations focused on product quality, food safety and sustainable practices.

We care about the kernels we produce for our consumers and nurture the raw cashew nuts at source. Our team is currently building farmer linkages that promote better farming practices, higher yields and stronger partnerships, and therefore aim to give farmers a fairer share of the value chain.

We care about our environmental footprint. We are currently reducing waste and fossil fuel by using part of our cashew shell for steam generation, and are actively developing partnerships to generate by-products such as cashew nut shell liquid, and shell cake for biomass use.