A cashew shortfall identified months before the supply chain could see it
How Freeworld Trading caught a cashew shortfall in the climate data months before it surfaced at processing, while every supplier still reported a large crop.
Freeworld Trading imports nuts and seeds from origin and supplies major retailers across the UK, Europe and the US. Cashew is bought against the crop long before it can be counted, and an importer's view of that crop is largely the view its suppliers provide. In early 2026, suppliers in Ivory Coast were reporting a large cashew crop, and nothing in that reporting pointed to a problem.
In January, Helios AI registered heat stress on Ivory Coast cashew and moved the crop to Take Action, months before any shortfall was visible in the chain. The in-shell arrived in the volumes suppliers had described, but at cracking roughly 5–6% of the crop proved unusable, and one project area could not be processed at all. Helios AI had flagged the cause, heat during the window in which the nut is set, while the crop was still on the tree. For a business that has had to argue to buyers that crop failures can be anticipated rather than absorbed, a dated call that proved correct is the substantiation.
- Why an importer's view of an origin crop is only as current as its suppliers' reporting
- How heat in the nut-set window shows up in the climate data months before harvest
- What the loss looked like at processing: roughly 5–6% on yield, one project area lost entirely
- Why a dated call that proved correct is the substantiation, not the forecast
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