Fair Trade Specialty Peanuts

Agricabv SA, Intersnack and Annona fund decided to set up a production facility in Bolivia together; Agrinuts. A PSI grant supported a part of this pilot projects investment. The project: a peanut ransformation centre including a peanut blanching process to solve any problems with Aflatoxine in peanuts.

High quality peanuts

In order to receive a constant and sufficient flow of high quality peanuts they also started up their own peanut cultivation, with modern techniques, starting with 200 hectares and increasing with a 100 ha every year reaching a minimum of 600 ha. They cannot and don’t want to produce the large amount of peanuts needed for export volumes themselves. But they do need enough production to reach sufficient volumes for export and to reach viability. As they have extensive experience working with outgrowers for their coffee business, a large part of the peanuts therefore come from outgrowers/families (More than 1.000 by year 4) which received special technical assistance to enlarge their yields and productivity.

Oerpinda

During the establishment of the facility and the training of famers , Agrinuts experienced a growing demand for peanuts and Intersnack. Intersnack invested heavily in marketing the OERPINDA and before we knew it the demand was rocketing. We exceeded our pilot target by far once the pilot was established. We exported 2.000 MT instead of our target of 800 MT. In December 2013 we finalised the TA training, which was provided to 337 small-farmers (280 men and 57 women).

Due to the large demand from Intersnack in the EU market we were able to start follow up investments with the help from ANNONA and Intersnack much faster than predicted.