THERE'S A NEW NUT ON THE WORLD STAGE

They grow exclusively in the region of South America that is called The Cerrado. The nuts come from the fruit of a tree known in some parts of Brazil as Baruziero, and in Bolivia as Almendra Chiquitana. The scientific name of the tree is Dipteryx alata Vogel. The trees are large, long-lived, and perfectly adapted to the unusual climate of the Cerrado such that they need no irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticide. A mature tree produces about 4000 fruits weighing approximately 25 grams. Each fruit has one nut that weighs approximately one gram inside a very hard shell.

Our Barùkas nuts are gently roasted, just the way they’re eaten by native people in the Cerrado. They have a flavor that's often described as a hybrid of different nuts, with notes of cocoa and popcorn with a satisfying crunch.

Barùkas nuts are premium nuts like macadamia and pine nuts. The costs of collecting the fruit and extracting the nut is quite high because each fruit weighing an average of 25 grams produces just one nut weighing a single gram. It is challenging to crack the very hard shell and extract the nut without breaking it. Barùkas Brazil has developed proprietary methods of collecting the fruit and extracting the nut that allow us for the first time to price Barùkas nuts in line with other premium nuts. Contact us for the best prices available.

Until now it has been cost prohibitive to gather the fruit and get the nut out of its incredibly hard shell casing in large  enough quantities to ship container loads around the world. But after 10 years of building collection infrastructure, and several R&D breakthroughs, Barùkas Brazil can now offer a steady supply of any quantity, from a single pallet to a full container load, while meeting the most stringent international food safety requirements.

Barukas nuts are not only delicious and crunchy, they are also good for your health and good for the health of the planet. Many people who buy Barùkas nuts appreciate the benefits they are bringing to the global ecology with every purchase, especially the elimination of the need for irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides required to grow the more common nuts.

Barùkas nuts make a delicious snack on their own, and their unmistakable crunch and rich flavor opens up endless culinary possibilities. They make a great butter or nut milk, and are delicious when paired with dark chocolate. They're also ideal for making pestos, granolas, pilafs, salads, and desserts. 

Actually they are nearly the same thing, but there are some important differences. In some areas of Brazil the nuts are known in Portuguese as Castahna de Baru which can be translated into English as “Baru Nut.” In other parts of Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay the nuts have many different names in local indigenous languages as well as in Spanish. Unfortunately most baru nuts are not well suited to export because the methods of collection, nut extraction and roasting can’t meet the high food safety standards required by many countries. Barùkas Brazil coined the brand name Barùkas to identify Barùkas nuts as being of consistent export quality and guaranteed to meet all food safety requirements.

Barùkas Brazil organizes the collection of fruit by native villagers in the late Spring and early Summer months of the Southern Hemisphere. The villagers typically earn their living as subsistence farmers with their own small plots of land or by working as hired hands on neighboring cattle ranches, or both.

Collecting fruit from nearby groves of trees provides welcome cash income during a time of year when the opportunity to sell their produce and find ranch work tends to fall off. Barùkas Brazil is very public in announcing the price at which it will buy fruit each season, always making sure that the price is high enough to motivate the hard work of gathering and hauling the fruit back to the village. The people who gather become card carrying members of The Association of Barùkas Fruit Foragers. Membership confers advantages and responsibilities. The primary advantage is the guarantee that we will purchase all of the fruit proffered to us by them at the publicly announced fair trade price. The responsibilities mostly involve good stewardship of the ecology such as leaving 1/3 of the fruit on the ground for the native fauna to eat, as well as social protections such as not involving children in their work.

Barùkas Brazil which was funded by an American charitable foundation has a primary objective of encouraging landowners in the Cerrado to replant millions of trees that were clearcut before the devastating impact on the ecology was well understood. In the initial phase while Barùkas Brazil is proving the commercial viability of growing the trees at scale, we support nurseries that provide saplings by donating the saplings to villagers who can benefit from planting them where they can conveniently harvest the fruit. 

As the exports of Barùkas Brazil grow we will encourage cattle ranchers to plant many small groves of saplings on their land where the trees grew before the clear cutting practices of the second half of the twentieth century. The key is to promise to purchase the fruit from these trees backed up by robust exports that demonstrate the commercial viability of the purchase contracts. Planting trees on cattle ranches has a triple benefit to the owner. Not only do they receive a new income stream from the fruit, they also improve the water ecology of their land and provide shade for the cattle. In retrospect many ranchers now realize that clear cutting was a mistake, leaving their cattle more exposed to dehydration for lack of shade, and making it more difficult for the land to naturally produce grazing fodder because of rapid evaporation that is mitigated by groves of trees that are naturally adapted to support the local water ecology. The charitable foundation’s long-term goal is to plant 20,000,000 trees over the next 10 years.