Why Cashew Prices Are Moving in 2026 | Native Roots Blog

Why Cashew Prices Are Moving in 2026

Ask five people why cashew prices have shifted this year and you'll likely get five different answers — export bans, weather, demand, the rupee. The honest answer is that all of them are true at once, and untangling which one is actually moving a given quote matters if you're planning bulk purchases around it.

The supply-side squeeze that started it

Benin's export ban on raw cashew nuts, put in place in April 2025, remains the single biggest structural factor behind where raw material costs sit today — Benin is one of the larger West African origins feeding into Indian processing, and taking that volume off the open market tightened availability across the board. Layered on top of that: a rainfall deficit in Zanzibar affected that season's yield, and a US import tariff added its own cost pressure on the trade side. None of these three has reversed, so the base cost of raw cashew nuts hasn't come down structurally, even where day-to-day quotes look calmer.

Demand actually cooled — which kept things from getting worse

What's kept prices from climbing further through mid-2026 is, somewhat counterintuitively, softer domestic demand. Sweet shops, traders and retailers have largely been buying hand-to-mouth rather than stocking ahead, which has kept CNF rates sideways to slightly soft in recent months even though none of the supply-side restrictions above have actually lifted. It's a genuinely mixed picture — tight supply pushing one way, cautious buying pulling the other.

Crop quality is adding its own cost, separate from supply volume

There's a third factor that doesn't show up in headline supply-and-demand numbers: how the season's crop actually came in. Weather disruption during harvest and drying — heavy rain interrupting collection in parts of West Africa this season, for instance — doesn't just affect how much raw material is available, it affects how much usable kernel comes out of a given batch once it's processed. A tonne of raw cashew nuts that's harder to dry and shell cleanly costs more to turn into finished kernels than the same tonne in a good-quality year, even before the market price of the raw material itself moves. That processing cost gets absorbed somewhere, and increasingly it's showing up in the quote.

The currency piece nobody quotes you directly

The one factor that's easy to miss entirely: raw cashew nuts are bought in US dollars, and the rupee has weakened meaningfully against the dollar through 2026 — down close to 9% over the past twelve months, after touching a low near ₹99.82 to the dollar earlier in the year. That means the same shipment, at the exact same dollar price a supplier locks in, now costs more in rupees to land in India than it did a year ago. This isn't a cashew-specific story at all — it's a currency one — but it shows up in the same final number as everything else, which is part of why the "why did the price go up" question rarely has one clean answer.

What this means for how you buy

None of this changes the basic logic of buying in part-shipment tranches rather than locking a full order at one fixed rate — if anything, a market moving on four different levers at once (supply, demand, crop quality, currency) is exactly the environment where pricing shipment-by-shipment at that week's rate protects both sides better than a single long-dated quote would. If festival-season stocking is on your radar, Diwali is roughly seven to eight weeks out from now — worth factoring the lead time into when you lock your next tranche, given how many things are currently moving the number at once.