The Salma Seetaroo Story — The Banker Who Fell in Love With a Cashew Nut

Côte d'Ivoire | Cashew Processing & Export

Salma Seetaroo was not looking for a cashew business. Born and raised in Mauritius, she built her early career as a mining finance banker, working deals across the African continent. Her path into cashew was a matter of professional accident. In 2018, while advising on the purchase of a failed cashew processing factory near Abidjan, in Azaguié — around 40km from the city — she was conducting due diligence on behalf of owners looking to sell out of financial difficulty.

She never completed that deal in the way she expected. Being on the ground, inside the factory, she fell for the crop itself — struck by its versatility, from the kernel that reaches supermarket shelves to the shell that can be converted into power, fertiliser, or animal feed. What began as a due-diligence exercise became a founding moment.

## The Value Gap She Set Out to Close

The thesis Salma built Cashew Coast on is a textbook case of the value-gap problem that defines so much of African commodity trade. Côte d'Ivoire grows close to half of the world's cashews, yet for decades most of that crop left the country raw, shipped to Asia for processing — sending the jobs and the profits abroad. The finished kernels would then travel most of the way back around the world to reach consumers in Europe and the United States.

Reflecting on what she saw when she entered the industry, she has said Côte d'Ivoire was the largest grower of cashews in the world, yet Ivorian cashews were being shipped to Vietnam for processing — despite requiring little energy to process — before the kernels travelled back to Europe for consumption. It didn't make sense to her, and she resolved that the jobs created by that processing belonged in West Africa.

That single observation — that a crop grown, harvested and consumed on two different continents was being processed on a third — became the founding logic of the company.

## Building the Model: Direct-Sourced, Origin-Processed

Cashew Coast's operating model runs on a simple structure: the company buys raw cashews directly from individual farmers in Côte d'Ivoire, processes the raw nuts into edible kernels at its own factory, then exports them wholesale, primarily into Europe.

The commercial case for processing at origin rests on geography. West African processors hold a structural advantage over their Asian counterparts: Europe is roughly three weeks away by sea, against the nearly four months required to ship raw cashews to Vietnam for processing and back. That shipping-time advantage translates directly into a freshness advantage — a decisive edge in a category where quality degrades with time and handling.

The scale this model has reached is substantial. Cashew Coast now employs 750 people and sources from more than 7,000 smallholder farmers, and roughly eight containers — around 15.8 tonnes each — leave the company's facilities every month, bound chiefly for distributors in the United States and Europe. Women make up 75 percent of the company's workforce, positioning Cashew Coast as much a social enterprise as a trading business.

## Five Certifications: Building Trust the Hard Way

Where many African exporters struggle to clear the compliance bar that European buyers set, Salma built certification into the company's identity from early on. Cashew Coast was the first cashew processor in Côte d'Ivoire to achieve BRCGS certification — the leading global standard for food safety — for its kernel exports. It earned that certification in February 2020, and by 2025 had held it for five consecutive years, maintaining an A grade throughout — the only processor in the country to have renewed it.

Layered onto that food-safety foundation is a full organic and ethical-trade certification stack: independent verification through Ecocert, covering both EU and USDA organic (NOP) standards, alongside Fair Trade certification held continuously since 2020, and Fair for Life — the rigorous social and fair-trade standard created in 2006, through which Ecocert became a recognised player in international fair trade certification, combining social, economic and environmental standards. Cashew Coast markets itself as the first processor in its field to be certified organic across its entire process, from the intake of raw nuts through to the packaging of the finished kernels.

This certification depth is not incidental. In a category where buyers in Rotterdam, Hamburg and New York are increasingly unwilling to touch product without verifiable chains of custody, Salma turned compliance into a competitive moat — one that most West African processors have not yet built.

## Capital to Match Ambition

The model has attracted serious patient capital. Specialist agriculture investor AgDevCo backed Cashew Coast with a €9 million mezzanine loan to finance expanded processing capacity, new warehouse construction, and farmer productivity programmes — an investment intended to double the company's processed volumes to 19,000 tonnes of raw cashew nuts a year. Salma described the value of that partnership plainly: AgDevCo brought long-term, flexible capital combined with agricultural acumen and a network of contacts to help the company reach its ambitious goals.

Her platform has continued to grow. In November 2025, she represented Cashew Coast at AGORA25, the World Bank Institute for Economic Development's "Africa Growth and Opportunity: Research in Action" conference in Palermo, where she spoke on how value-added Ivorian cashew exports to Europe can drive inclusive, resilient growth across the value chain. She has also represented the company at investor convenings such as Bpifrance's "Industrialize & Connect Africa" meeting in Paris.

## What African Agribusiness Can Learn

Cashew Coast is a compact case study in a lesson worth returning to often: the money in African commodities is rarely in growing the crop — it is in who processes it, and where.

**1. Chase the value-add, not just the volume.** Côte d'Ivoire has been the world's largest cashew grower for years without capturing the profit pool that scale should command. Salma's insight was structural, not agronomic: the crop didn't need to change, the location of processing did.

**2. Turn geography into a commercial argument.** The three-week-versus-four-month shipping differential to Europe is not a footnote — it is the core of Cashew Coast's pitch to buyers. African exporters routinely undersell proximity advantages that Asian competitors cannot replicate.

**3. Certification is market access, not paperwork.** Five certifications — BRCGS, Ecocert NOP, Ecocert EOS, Fair Trade, and Fair for Life — is a heavier compliance load than most African processors choose to carry. It is also precisely what unlocks premium European and US retail and ingredient-brand relationships that lower-certified competitors cannot reach.

**4. Patient, sector-literate capital compounds.** AgDevCo's mezzanine structure gave Cashew Coast growth capital without the exit pressure of pure equity — a financing pattern African agribusiness founders should study and actively pursue over faster, less aligned capital.

**5. Inclusion is a business asset, not a side programme.** A workforce that is 75 percent women and a farmer network exceeding 7,000 smallholders are not CSR flourishes — they are the traceability and social-license infrastructure that makes the certifications, and therefore the export contracts, possible.

Salma Seetaroo did not set out to build a cashew empire. She walked into a failing factory to do due diligence and walked out with a thesis: that the value West Africa was exporting raw, it could — and should — capture at home. Cashew Coast is what that thesis looks like at 19,000 tonnes and counting.

Africa One Brand: Profiling the founders building Africa's agribusiness and consumer brands from the ground up. Follow the series for more founder deep dives.