Tanzania’s Record Cashew Crop Is Colliding With Its Outturn Problem

Tanzania's 2025/26 cashew season has the shape of a triumph. The Cashewnut Board of Tanzania (CBT) opened the season chasing 700,000 tonnes of raw cashew nuts (RCN), a target that would beat the 528,000-tonne record set the previous year by roughly a third, with the board talking openly about one million tonnes by 2030. Early trading backed up the ambition: the first Tanzania Mercantile Exchange (TMX) auction of the season, in November, moved 26,254 tonnes in a single sale, and the MAMCU cooperative union alone sold 82,000 tonnes within weeks. By the time industry trackers took stock, something in the order of 365,000-375,000 tonnes had already passed through the auction system, putting the season well past the one-third mark against even the more conservative estimate that the harvest would "comfortably surpass" 600,000 tonnes. Farmers had already banked more than Sh1.3 trillion from crop sales.

That is the headline story, and it is a real one. It is also not the whole story a serious buyer needs.

What outturn actually measures

When a buyer asks about outturn — formally, the kernel outturn ratio, or KOR — they are asking a specific, lab-measurable question: how many pounds of usable kernel will come out of one 80-kilogram bag of raw nuts. The trade's standard method draws samples across a lot, counts nuts per kilogram (typically 150-240), checks that moisture sits in the 7-10 percent band, cuts a subsample to separate whole kernels from broken pieces and defects, and applies a conversion factor (around 0.75) to translate the cut-test result into a bag-weight figure. A result in the low-to-mid 40s is weak; 48 pounds is the conventional line for "good" quality; 52 pounds and above is a premium lot. CBT's own published sales rules formalize this into two tiers: standard grade requires a shelling outturn of 48 pounds per 80-kilogram bag or higher, while under grade covers 44 up to (but not including) 48 pounds — with additional physical tests, including a grey, unwrinkled shell that produces "a sharp audible sound when dropped," used as a proxy for proper drying.

Outturn is, in other words, the number that converts a tonnage figure into an economic one. A buyer who quotes on volume alone, without pinning down outturn, is pricing blind.

The gap showing up in this season's lots

This is where the 2025/26 season's record-setting narrative runs into friction. Trade reporting on the early auctions has flagged lots arriving out of Mtwara and Lindi — the historic core of Tanzania's cashew belt — with high moisture content and outturn in the 42-44 pound range, against a premium benchmark of 48-50 pounds. Some of that material sits below CBT's own regulatory floor for "under grade" at 44 pounds, meaning it is arriving at auction close to the edge of what the rules classify as sellable at all. The pattern globally has been consistent this season: premium RCN in the 45-49 pound range has captured real premiums, while low-KOR nuts in the 39-43 pound band have "consistently underperformed" in demand. Buyers have responded the way procurement desks respond to unpriced risk — with cautious, "hand-to-mouth" purchasing rather than forward commitments, even as export offers out of the region have held in a narrow $1,720-1,750 per tonne CFR Ho Chi Minh City range.

There is a structural reason this keeps happening rather than resolving itself season to season. Tanzania's warehouse receipt and auction system, run jointly by CBT, the Warehouse Receipts Regulatory Board and TMX, was built to fix a genuine and well-documented problem: opaque, exploitative farm-gate pricing, with farmers historically selling at TSh 1,500-2,500 per kilogram before auction prices roughly doubled that once bidding opened. On that measure it has clearly worked — TMX's own reporting, and the wider warehouse receipt system's Sh2.3 trillion in trade value across 18 crops last financial year, point to a genuine and rapid institutionalization of price discovery. But the system centralizes where price gets discovered, not where quality gets made. Moisture control and proper drying happen at the primary society and farm level, well before a lot ever reaches an auction catalogue; the auction only reveals a quality problem once it is already baked into the bag. Industry commentary on this season's growth has described it plainly as testing whether Tanzania's institutions can keep control of quality at the same pace they have scaled volume.

Why the tonnage record doesn't automatically buy Tanzania a bigger seat at the table

There is a second, less visible way the volume story is more complicated than it looks. A UN Comtrade-based analysis published in the East African Journal of Business and Economics found that even as Tanzania's cashew export quantity rose 65.7 percent, its share of the global cashew export market actually slipped, from 4.6 percent to 4.3 percent — because the world market itself was expanding even faster, at nearly 76 percent. Producing more does not automatically mean capturing more of the value pool, particularly when almost all of that growth still leaves the country as an unprocessed raw commodity.

That last point is the crux of Tanzania's other stated ambition for this season: ending raw cashew exports altogether by 2026/27 in favor of domestic processing. It is a serious policy goal, backed by an agro-industrial park under construction at Maranje in Mtwara, developed with the Arise group, targeting a cumulative 600,000 tonnes of processing capacity. But by at least one industry account, Tanzania currently processes only around 2 percent of its own harvest domestically, sending the remaining roughly 98 percent abroad as raw nuts — overwhelmingly to India and Vietnam. Vietnam, notably, is not really a cashew-growing power so much as a processing one: it produces a fraction of Ivory Coast's output but converts imported raw material — including RCN sourced through India from Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique — into the great majority of the world's traded cashew kernels. Against a 700,000-tonne target harvest, installed local processing capacity has been estimated at only around 42,000 tonnes, a gap that no industrial park currently under construction closes in a single season.

For buyers evaluating Tanzania as an origin this year, the practical read is this: the volume and revenue numbers coming out of Dodoma are real and verifiable, and the auction system genuinely has improved farmer price transparency. But none of that substitutes for testing outturn lot by lot, especially on Mtwara/Lindi material moving early in the season under wetter conditions. Tanzania is proving it can grow more cashews and sell more cashews through a more transparent mechanism. Whether it can consistently grow better cashews at that same scale — and whether it can keep enough of them at home to process — remains the open question this season is actually testing.