Spotlight on

Honest Cashew

Our approach to changing the cashew industry, snack by snack

Every handful of cashew passes through multiple steps before it reaches your snack bowl – moving through smallholder farms, shelling, peeling, roasting and packing. Yet the supply chain behind it remains highly fragmented and often untransparent. In such a chain, issues can easily go unnoticed, making it harder to identify and address sustainability challenges such as working conditions, income and full traceability.

That’s why we created Honest Cashew.

Honest Cashew

is Intersnack’s initiative to make a difference. It’s how we take responsibility for the way our cashews are processed and brought to market, and how we can use our influence to support better standards for workers, farmers and communities. So, each pack of cashews is one you can trust and love, snack by snack.

Honest Cashew focuses on three areas: Responsible Employment, Consistent Quality and Partnering for Change. Processing in our own facilities in India and Vietnam means we can closely oversee working conditions and cashew quality, while long-term projects and sector initiatives support farmer livelihoods and better environmental practices along the value chain.

Responsible employment

We believe good snacks should come from good jobs. In our integrated processing facilities, teams work together in a controlled environment with clear standards for health and safety, training and workers’ rights. Cashew processing is often seasonal work with poor working conditions and no stable income, but in our model all employees receive health and accident insurance and annual salary contracts rather than short‑term seasonal arrangements, ensuring job security and a reliable livelihood.

Independent verification: We undergo regular third-party assessments, including SMETA audits recorded on the SEDEX platform, to help check ethical, safety and labour standards and guide improvements.

Consistent quality

Great quality isn’t a coincidence: it’s a habit. To make sure every pack meets the same high standard, our structured quality-control process includes almost 50 checks across more than 500 parameters, from steaming, shelling and peeling to grading, packing and dispatch. Independent laboratories and third-party audits regularly verify that our cashews meet strict quality, safety and traceability requirements, so you know exactly what you are enjoying.

Partnering for change

Real change happens in partnership. We work with cooperatives, NGOs, suppliers and sector initiatives such as Sustainable Nut Inititatives (SNI) to strengthen the wider cashew value chain. Through partners such as ComCashew and GIZ, thousands of smallholder farmers have received training to improve productivity and quality, including a project in Cambodia that aims to support 2,000 farming families and shorten the supply chain.

These efforts reflect Intersnack’s long-term commitment to meaningful partnerships and pre-competitive cooperation, helping drive continuous improvementand more inclusive, sector-wide progress in the cashew industry.

We also rely on trusted partners to maintain our high standards. Independent, third-party standards, certifications, and audits (such as SMETA) help us assess and improve working conditions, environmental performance, and business ethics in our supply chains. By identifying risks, driving improvements through action plans, and providing greater transparency, we help ensure our cashews deserve the name ‘honest.’