Cashew Is Not Just About the Nuts, It’s About Wine and Prune, Too
Most people, when they talk about cashew, refer only to the nuts. Perhaps this is due to the growing popularity of cashew nuts as snack food and an ingredient in baked products, so it is considered as the most important product from cashew.
Palawan is considered the cashew capital of the Philippines, supplying 90 percent of the country’s nut requirement. In Roxas, for instance, there are 1,161,576 fruit-bearing trees producing an average of 13,938 metric tons of nuts.
Due to the abundance of this fruit, cashew is the major One-Town, One-Product (OTOP) of Palawan. OTOP is 1 priority program of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to promote entrepreneurship and create jobs by promoting a specific product or service with competitive advantage in each city and municipality. And for this program, Palawan has planted 24,300 hectares to cashew in 2004.
A versatile plant, cashew thrives well in Palawan’s changing seasons. It is drought-resistant and can survive heavy rainfall. It can also adapt to different soil types even on marginal and acidic lands where no other crop could thrive. It bears fruit yearly during dry season.
Most farmers, however, grow cashew for the nuts only that’s why the cashew apple often referred as the “pseudofruit” or false fruit because it is the swollen stalk of the-true fruit that is the cashew nut just becomes a byproduct of the cashew nut industry. But why? Due to its high astringency, cashew apples arc seldom eaten fresh, so these are completely neglected. Now imagine how much of these fruits go to waste for the country to achieve its cashew nut requirement in commercial scale.
For this reason, the Research Department of the Western Philippines University (WPU) in Aborlan, Palawan led by its researcher Estrella B. Equina, thought of how Palavveno farmers could gain economic value from cashew apple.
DEVELOPING CASHEW WINE AND PRUNE
Equina’s group, in collaboration with .he Food Processing Center of WPU, developed a village-level processing to utilize cashew apple. And they have come up with two interesting products: cashew wine and prune.
The technology involves the natural extraction of the juice from cashew apple through osmotic process wherein the natural fibers and membranes of the pulp filter the undesirable organic components that are responsible for the astringent and acrid taste of the juice. The extracted juice then becomes the material use to produce wine while the remaining pulp is used to make prune.
The wine is sparkling yellowish-brown w4en fermented from the juice extract of the cashew apple and becomes reddish-brown upon aging for more than a year. It contains 10 net-cent to 12 percent ethyl alcohol, and a bottle is sold at P200.
On one hand, the prune, which come, from the pulp of the cashew fruit, is brownish-black, plumy, and sweet-sour in taste. It’s like the raisins, dates. and plums which can be eaten as snack or dessert. It costs P 110 per kilo.
COMMERCIALIZATION
To commercialize the production cashew wine and prunes, the WPUbased Turbudan Food Processor adopted the technology. Funded by the Commission on Higher Education and WPU, the project was operated by 17 personnel.
In two months, they were able to process 300 kg of cashew apples per day. Equina reported that “the production output was 30 percent recovery yield for wine and 25 percent for the prunes, [and these were] equivalent to an annual production of 8,353 bottles of wine and 3,264 kg of prunes.”
The total project cost, said Equina, was P1, 339,611, covering fixed capital investment of P403,390 and twomonth working capital of P936, 221. The Return on Investment is 63.84 percent with a payback period of 1.52 years.
Actually since the inception of the project in 1990, this technology had been adopted by various Rural Improvement Clubs (RICs) throughout the country. Among them were RICs in Bataan, Cagayan de Oro, Roxas, Palawan, and Zambales along with other small-scale food processors.
Today, farmers in Palawan are gaining profit from cashew apple. According .to Esquina, cashew apple is gradually gaining economic value that is more than four times that of cashew nuts.
Another good thing is that it has also contributed to the creation of jobs in the countryside because more than half a million salary compensation has been flown into the economic stream of the community.
By Rita T. Dela Cruz
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