We source Fairtrade Certified Cashews – Here’s Why This is Important.

When it comes to vegan ice cream, cashews are something of a miracle ingredient. Their creamy taste and texture make them the perfect substitute for dairy without losing the flavour profile associated with a dairy ice cream.

However, much of the cashew trade lacks transparency, leaving it open to unethical practices – as a result, only 3% of the world’s raw cashews can be certified as Fairtrade.

A primary concern with non-fairly traded cashew nuts is working conditions –  NGOs have highlighted instances of forced labour in Vietnam and poor working conditions in India where workers suffer burns from the cashew shelling process thanks to insufficient protective equipment.

While a lot of promises have been made about improving working practices, much of the cashew supply chain is complex. The nuts are often grown and processed in different countries, often with several small processors involved and many links between them and the eventual supplier. This can make it exceptionally difficult to effectively trace a nut through a supply chain, ensure that best practices have been followed throughout and guarantee that no one has been exploited along the way. 

At Beau’s, we’ve always sourced fairly traded cashew nuts but have recently switched supplier to Liberation Nuts, a Fairtrade certified nut supplier based in the UK. The Fairtrade system ensures a fair minimum price for producers, protects workers’ rights and promotes a sustainable farming process.

From our perspective, using a Fairtrade certified supplier gives us complete transparency over the supply chain for our cashews. Via Liberation Nuts, our cashews will come from Coprolef, a 400-strong cooperative in Burkina Faso, and from the Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK), which consists of 5,000 smallholders in India using crop diversification and organic and traditional farming techniques to safeguard against climate destruction.

Fairtrade and organic where possible

 As well as aiming to source Fairtrade-certified ingredients wherever we can, we also look for organic where possible. While not all of Liberation Nuts’ cashews are certified organic, many of the cooperatives it works with are. Those that aren’t use farming methods that follow organic farming practices – including refusing to use environmentally unsafe chemicals in the growing process.

While we have the ambition of being organic-certified in the future, this is a by-product of wanting to work with the right suppliers and making the most ethical choice available to us. By switching to Liberation Nuts, we are not only able to understand exactly what happens to our cashews from fruit to gelato, we can also know that they are being grown using ethical practices and that everyone involved in the production and processing is being compensated and treated fairly throughout. That’s no small thing.