According to a press release from the Tanzanian embassy in Algiers published on August 20 after Ambassador Mobhare Matinyi's visit to the Oran factory of Sarl Anacard'Or Cashew, Walid Dib, owner and general manager of the company, announces the construction of three modern cashew nut processing units in Tanzania. Only one location has been chosen. It is to be established in Masasi, in the Mtwara region, at the heart of the southern Tanzanian nut-producing area. It will be run by a joint venture with a local partner, Kilimanjaro Nuts Ltd, which is still being formalized. The logistical timeline is precise: warehouses are being prepared in Masasi, equipment will be ordered from Vietnam in September, and the equipment will arrive starting in January 2027, along with technicians tasked with training the local workforce. On everything else, we have no real information. No investment amount, no annual capacity, no financing plan, no allocated land, and no location of the two other units. No end buyer is mentioned. At this stage, the project is based on a publicly stated and officially supported intention. × A small-to-medium-sized coffee roasting company, not an industrial group Algerian business directories list Anacard Or SARL in Bir El Djir, Oran province, as a company involved in roasting dried fruit, steaming dried vegetables, and packaging agricultural products. The commercial register indicates that the company was established on October 18, 2020, with a share capital of 40.641 million dinars, or approximately €263,000 at the official exchange rate. This capital figure does not reflect the company's actual financial capacity, as it may have partners, bank loans, or a Tanzanian company. When questioned by the Tanzanian press, Walid Dib detailed his current supplies: six containers received the previous month, six more at the port of Oran, seven at sea, and seven awaiting shipment in Dar es Salaam. At 27 tons per container, this amounts to approximately 700 tons in circulation, of which around 155 to 175 tons would be marketable almonds. Newsletter My Tribune The news that matters to you, every day in your inbox. Register Illustration from the Ma Tribune newsletter This figure represents a snapshot of stock in transit, not an annual volume, and the same route can be repeated several times a year. A single metric indicates a specific rate: six containers in one month, or approximately 160 tons. If this pace were maintained, the volume would be on the order of 1,500 to 2,000 tons per year. The Tanzanian harvest, meanwhile, reached 617,683 tons during the 2025/2026 season, compared to 155,244 tons ten years earlier. The company claims to process the nuts in eleven stages at its Oran plant. Cooking, drying, shelling, separating, peeling, grading, and packaging: this is the standard process for the industry. No publicly available data exists to measure its capacity, yield, or export volumes. Three questions would determine the seriousness of the claim, and no one has yet asked them: How many tons did the Oran plant process in 2025? What is the capacity of each of the three Tanzanian plants? Who is the local shareholder of Kilimanjaro Nuts? Tanzania has good reason to demand figures before celebrating. In 2025, the Minister of Industry and Trade, Selemani Jafo, counted 57 processing units in the country. Thirty-six were operational. Twenty-one were out of service due to undercapitalization, outdated machinery, weak export markets, and an inability to secure raw materials from foreign buyers. Furthermore, the volumes processed remain poorly established: 6,628 tons in 2020/2021 and 26,656 tons in 2023/2024 according to official figures, and approximately 20,000 tons in 2025 according to N'kalô, an independent business consulting firm specializing in tropical sectors. The purchase price of the nut is the main challenge to monitor. It is often said that local processing is not taking off due to a lack of incentives. This argument no longer holds water. Exports of raw cashew nuts are subject to an export duty of 15% of their value before loading onto the means of transport, or $160 per ton, while exports of kernels are exempt. The Tanzanian Cashew Council (CBT) helps investors obtain land or lease existing processing facilities. In Maranje, in the Nanyamba district, it is developing an industrial park of 1,572 acres, or 636 hectares, estimated at around 300 billion shillings for about thirty factories by 2030. The Ecofin Agency indicates that the park is being developed with the Arise group and aims for a cumulative capacity of 600,000 tonnes, two elements absent from the official Tanzanian documents consulted. The problem lies elsewhere, and it boils down to simple arithmetic. A ton of raw walnuts doesn't yield a ton of kernels. It yields 220 to 250 kilos, with the shell and husk accounting for the rest. However, the first auctions for the 2025/2026 season concluded at between 2,550 and 3,520 shillings per kilo, or approximately $930 to $1,290 per ton. Meanwhile, in June 2026, a kilo of wholesale kernels was trading at around $4.20 in Vietnam, $4.09 in Ivory Coast, and $5.43 in India. Therefore, a ton of Tanzanian walnuts produces between $900 and $1,350 worth of kernels, for a purchase cost of $930 to $1,290. In other words, the raw material absorbs the bulk of the sales revenue. This comes before wages, energy, drying, losses, packaging, certification, freight, and inventory financing. Profit is only realized at the margins, specifically: on above-average yields, on a high percentage of whole almonds which sell for 30% to 50% more, on purchases made at the end of the season, and on the valorization of the shell liquid, used in resins and friction materials, which requires an additional production line. This equation explains the geography of the sector better than any public policy. In Côte d'Ivoire, the farmgate price for the 2025/2026 season is set at 400 CFA francs per kilo, approximately $0.65. An Ivorian processor buys his raw material for half the price of his Tanzanian competitor. The superior quality of Tanzanian cashew nuts, highlighted by Walid Dib to justify his choice, is therefore paid for upfront and weighs on the industrial margin before ultimately supporting it. Added to this is a cash flow constraint. The harvest is concentrated between October and January. A processor must buy all the raw material needed for the year in just four months, facing competition from Vietnamese and Indian traders who pay cash and have worked with the same producers for decades. These two countries are both the primary buyers of Tanzanian cashew nuts and the main competitors of any processing plant located there. One figure illustrates the scale of the power dynamic: the first auction of the 2025/2026 season was for 26,254 tons, more than Tanzania processes in an entire year. Finally, prices have become unpredictable. The first auctions of 2024/2025 concluded at around 4,000 shillings per kilo, a record hailed by producers, before falling by a third a year later. The sector also remembers the events of 2018, when President John Magufuli dismissed his Ministers of Agriculture and Commerce, dissolved the Cashew Council, and sent the army to buy the harvest. A foreign investor knows they are operating in a sector that the state can seize control of at a moment's notice. The official objective remains to process at least 60% of production locally by 2030, while the CBT aims for 750,000 tons in the next season and then one million tons. Processing 600,000 tons would require multiplying the volumes processed in 2023/2024 by more than twenty. No publicly documented investment plan allows this to be achieved. And the equipment for Anacard'Or will come from Vietnam, as in almost all African shelling projects: relocating processing does not relocate the manufacturing of the machines, their maintenance, or the final markets. The real test of the project, therefore, is not industrial, but commercial. The simplest explanation for Masasi's choice is physical, since the kernel represents only a quarter of the raw nut's weight, and shipping nuts in their shells from Dar es Salaam to Oran amounts to paying freight for waste. But the Algerian market alone doesn't justify three factories. Regularly selling certified almonds in Europe or the Middle East requires complete traceability, aflatoxin testing, HACCP systems, often BRCGS or IFS certification, and contracts with importers. That's where the value lies. It's also the barrier that most of the stalled Tanzanian factories have never overcome.