Mechanization is both savior and straight jacket for a business, I realized while volunteering on a hazelnut farm.
If there is one machine that has the most potential to improve productivity and efficiency for nut processors, it’s probably the deshelling machine. The machine, in essence, takes the nuts in their shells, cracks the hard outer covering, and then ejects the kernels, ready to be eaten.
Within that broad category of machine, there’s a wide spectrum of makes and models. At the lowest end, we have the traditional handheld nutcracker familiar to most of us as the utensil buried in the depths of a kitchen drawer, to be unearthed around the holidays when grocery stores decide that it is more festive to sell walnuts and hazelnuts in their shells.
At the highest end, there are machines that take up an entire length and height of a room, which not only shell nuts, but are equipped with air blasts, lasers, x-rays, and cameras to sort, grade, and reject the nuts without any human intervention.
I’ve stared at the desheller often while volunteering at the hazelnut farm in Macedonia, mesmerized by the sea of nuts being fed through the receiving funnel. They’re cracked, then bounce around the length of the machine over narrow slits so the smaller, broken bits of shells fall through, and the whole, shelled kernels come out the other end. People who work in factories must think it so mundane, but I find it utterly fascinating that a hazelnut can whip through a machine in one form and emerge out the other end a few seconds later, transformed.
An automated nut shelling machine on Alibaba can cost around $2,000 and shell about 400 kg/hour, if you believe the manufacturer’s description. That’s the potential to shell more than a hundred thousand hazelnuts an hour, 2,000 a minute.
Compare that to gripping those awkward, slippery handheld contraptions at Christmas. With a deshelling machine, a nut farmer can process his or her entire harvest in no time at all.
But it’s not quite so easy. Hazelnuts, like everything else, are not uniform. They are tiny, large, round, lumpy, oblong, flat, thick, conjoined twins, still in their outer husk, and sometimes just funny looking. This mesmerizing, almost magical deshelling machine is also quite finicky, and can only handle hazelnuts of similar size and shape at each setting. So, in order to shell 2,000 nuts a minute, we first need 2,000 hazelnuts that look very much the same.
This of course means that we need another machine that sizes and sorts the nuts before they can be run through the desheller. Otherwise, the smaller nuts fall through untouched, and the larger nuts are mashed up and broken, to be discarded with the shell bits.
Even after shelling, there will be nuts that have passed through the machine unscathed, shell intact and ignored by the machine. These need to be run through yet another machine, which can further sort and separate so that the nuts can be returned into the desheller.
Processing thus becomes an intricate sequence of steps, all reliant on machines to prepare and fix the problems of other machines.
This video, from the Produce Nerd blog, shows the post-harvest process as it exists in the modern world, dominated by machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcLPRJw1w_E
I have thought about machines quite a lot over the past couple months as I flesh out my business plan. After working for various UN agencies and the World Bank Group since 2006, I’ve decided to take a break and start a business to import nuts into the EU.
(Alright. Go on and say it. “That’s pretty nutty!”)
The idea stemmed from a combination of factors. First, I had lived in Afghanistan and previously spent time in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and came to know the diversity and incredible flavors of the nuts from that region. Almonds, especially, originate from Central Asia and come in dozens of varieties that aren’t found anywhere else in the world.
Second, I was living in Denmark, a country with expensive and incredibly tasteless nuts, a function of a high tariff and limited number of distributors/importers.
Third, a good friend had recently started the spice company Burlap & Barrel, which buys spices directly from small farmers. Ethan proved that a former aid worker can launch a business with development impact, armed initially only with grit, fearlessness, and good instincts.
Last, and perhaps the key motivating factor, I had just turned 40. I wasn’t anywhere near the person I thought I would be at 40, that age when one should have already become the person they wanted to be when they grew up.
When my contract with UNICEF ended last year, I declined an extension and chose instead to focus on researching the nut business and barriers preventing small farmers from reaching international markets. Everything about it was new: reaching out on LinkedIn to talk to strangers working in agricultural development; walking into shops and restaurants in Copenhagen to ask where their supplies came from; attending Gulfood, the world’s largest food and beverage trade fair in Dubai, to talk to food companies and try to understand the landscape.
I realized very quickly the depth of the mismatch between the buyers and producers. Buyers, typically multinational supermarkets, snack food/confectionery companies, or commodities traders, demand volumes to bring costs down. To ensure food safety, they demand certifications and a certain level of standardization.
The producers though? Those farmers in Afghanistan, who own half an acre of land, reliant on rain to irrigate their crops and hammers to shell their nuts? How would they ever meet the requirements of the market without machines?
At the hazelnut farm, I asked Bosko Nelkoski, the owner of the farm, which of his machines was the most important for his business. “All of them,” he says matter-of-factly. “The nut shelling machine is important, but it won’t work without the sorter machine. And I need to have two of each machine in case one of them breaks down.”
He shows me the cold storage facility, where he stores his hazelnuts in-shell after harvest. The storeroom is temperature and humidity controlled, which keeps the nuts fresher. He theorizes that one of the reasons nuts are stale and tasteless when bought at the supermarket is that they’ve been shelled too early and stored improperly, thus releasing all the oils and fats that give hazelnuts their sweet, creamy flavor.
So then. Machines. Trained staff to maintain and repair the machines when broken. Cold storage. A constant source of electricity for the machines and the storage facilities.
I begin to understand why retailers and importers just buy their nuts from California.
