Cracking Nuts (artisan nuts from North Devon)

Cracking Nuts is a brand of snacking nuts from north Devon. The difference from most brands is that these are free from palm oil and sold in zero-waste packaging (glass jars or cardboard tubs with paper bag refills).

Cracking Nuts began, when the nut-loving couple served up nuts at a little trailer to local surfers on the Devon coast. They were so popular, they sold  them at Glastonbury. Then it became an online business, and now the nuts are also sold wholesale to shops and pubs nationwide.

All the nuts are hand-roasted in small batches in Ilfracombe, a town on the North Devon coast that is home to England’s oldest-working lighthouse (which has been protecting ships from the treacherous coast for over 650 years) and unique colourful Victorian houses.

• Avoid nuts for allergies, children under 5 and swallowing difficulties (nut and seed butters are also choking hazards).
• Keep away from pets (due to nuts, nutmeg and vanilla – use a letterbox guard for online orders). Read more on food safety for people and pets. 
• Never feed ‘human nuts’ to garden birds or wildfowl due to salt – peanuts can choke baby birds). If you feed birds, read more on safe havens for garden birds.
• You can place stale/unused nuts in food waste bins (only compost salt-free nuts that are low in oil, to avoid harming compost creatures and attracting rodents – crush them first, to break down properly).

Join the Nut Club!

If you are a fan, join up with the Nut Club for 15% off, plus seasonal offerings, nutty treat exclusives, testing of new products before launch, and big discounts on nuts with short shelf life.

Flavours in the Range

Most items in the range are vegan-friendly.

• Naked Nuts (hazelnuts, cashews & almonds)
• The King’s Nuts (hazelnuts & cranberries with caramelized pecans)
• The Cracking Mix (sweet and salted peanuts, cashews & almonds)
• Salted Mixed Nuts (peanuts, cashews and almonds)
• Cinnamon & Vanilla Cashews
• Smoked Hickory Mixed Nuts
• Sweet Roasted Mixed Nuts
• Sweet Chilli & Lime Roasted Peanuts
• Salted Caramel Cashews
• Rosemary Spiced Mixed Nuts
• Chilli Peanuts with Lime Cashews
• Chilli Peanuts (roasted in Devon-grown oil)
• Coronation Cashews (with mild curry spices)
• German Christmas Market (caramelised with cinnamon and vanilla)
• Christmas Spiced Nuts (cashews & almonds nutmeg, ginger, cloves)

Why Switch to Cracking Nuts?

An estimated 400 million packs of snacking nuts are sold each year in the UK, and of course many more are sold in pubs to go with pints of beer. That’s over 8 million packs a week. So by switching to Cracking Nuts, that’s an awful lot of plastic waste avoided (plastic is made from oil).

If you eat nuts in plastic packs, recycle packaging at supermarket bag bins, if your kerbside does not recycle.

Many brands also use palm oil (its unsustainable use is contributing to deforestation in Indonesia, home to orangutans and other endangered species). There is no such  thing as ‘sustainable palm oil’ (this is just a self-policed term by industry with no legal meaning – Greenpeace says the phrase is ‘as useful as a chocolate teapot’.

Cracking Nuts are also locally-roasted with natural ingredients, bringing money into local economies as a small independent food brand.

Buy Loose Nuts from Bulk Stores

Most towns have a zero waste shop (a bit like the old ‘scoop shops’) where you take along clean dry containers and fill up with what you want, to reduce food waste.

They work using a tare scheme. So you weigh your empty container  then fill up, then the tare weight is deducted. So you are paying for food, and not the packaging.

Nut Allergies: Keeping Safe & First Aid

Around 2 in 100 children (and 1 in 200 adults) have a nut allergy, so never serve or store nearby, as a severe allergy can kill someone in minutes. The main allergenic nuts are almonds, walnuts, cashews, hazelnuts and peanuts (legumes). Symptoms of nut allergies usually show up within minutes:

• Itching/swelling of lips, tongue or face
• Hives or a rash
• Stomach pain and nausea
• Severe swelling
• A drop in blood pressure)
• Breathing trouble

If someone displays a severe nut allergy, ask them to direct you to their Epi-Pen (if they have one), jab it in their thigh at a right angle, hold for 3 seconds, then remove. Call 999 for help, stating the reason is ‘anna-fill-axis’.

Patients should lie down with feet raised (or sit up if this makes you breathless, but for as short a time as possible).

Keep Kitchens Safe for Nut Allergies

It’s UK law for packaged foods to list nuts as ingredients, in bold print. That’s why (though it may seem silly) that bags of nuts say ‘may contain nuts’ on the label.

Restaurants, cafés, and catering services offer allergen lists. Use different knives, chopping boards and storage containers, when serving customers or guests with allergies. Food Standards Agency offers free online training for allergies.

Are Almonds & Cashews Ethical to Eat?

You may have heard about this, the so-called ‘avocado issue’ where some methods of farming almonds and cashews abroad use colossal amounts of water, in states prone to drought. This big corporate farms also use pesticides that lead to monoculture orchards, so bees get sick (more bees die in the USA, than animals and fish that are killed for food).

Brands like Cracking Nuts are small and independent, so more likely to source their nuts responsibly, such as buying almonds from Europe, rather than Californian big suppliers. They also purchase responsibly-sourced flavourings like vanilla.

The Bee Better Certified program has more information on how to recognise nuts that are grown and produced by certified suppliers, to ensure pollinator-friendly practices.