Video Transcript
The Galip nut grows all the way through from Indonesia all the way down to Vanuatu through the Pacific Islands. And it's a rainforest tree and it's really nutritious. It's high in zinc. It's high in iron. People have been growing it and using it in village life for thousands and thousands of years.
It's a really important part of traditional culture and indigenous culture in those places. We didn't know that there was market potential and that was part of our research project is to find how do we how do we process and package this thing and then how do we sell it? What sorts of things would people buy? What kinds of products would people buy and what would what would have strong demand in the supermarket.
My name is Gautri Hanet and I have been involved with this Galip development since 2007.
We have some record archaeological records where Galip tree has been planted about 14,000 years ago and the cultivation of it has already been done by our ancestors and it is very significant also to our culture. They're nice and low actually. They're really good.
These ones they'd be fully grown, wouldn't they? Yes, full size now. They have reached the full size. That branch is now ready to fall. In one or two weeks, even 3 weeks-time, you will see that all the nuts will fall off that branch.
When they're harvesting the Galip nut, it can just be picked up off the ground. You don't have to climb trees or anything like that. It's very easy to harvest. When it goes purple, it gets ripe and then it falls to the ground.
Traditionally, that's the women and children's job. And one of the good things about this crop is that we knew that if we commercialised it, it was going to benefit women and children.
So when we started the project, the only way you could buy Galip nut was at the roadside markets fresh wrapped in banana leaves. There wasn't really any kind of industry at all. There were a lot of doubters. A lot of people said, "Well, people won't buy this. It's an indigenous food. People won't value it. They'll buy the cheap peanuts from other countries instead." And they didn't really believe there was going to be a market for this product.
What we did is we made some product and we tested it in the market. And that was really the whole point of the research. Let's test the market and see what happens and see what sells and what doesn't sell. It sold so quickly that we were always sold out.
And then suddenly everyone's like, "Oh, I think I want to invest in this. I think I want to get involved because they could see that there was a real market potential." And that was the breakthrough.
That's what changed everything in terms of being able to commercialise this because it gave people the confidence to say, "Well, okay, maybe I want to have a go at this." Our key relationship was with National Agricultural Research Institute, NARI in Papua New Guinea and they were the ones that really did all the on the ground work about how do how do we process this?
We had to figure out how long is this shelf stable for? Is it good quality? We designed experiments and then they would run through those experiments.
Then we worked with them on this is what it means and this is what we should try. This is adapted from dryers we have in the macadamia industry and adapted to be low cost for here.
It's a really efficient way. It dries about a ton. Is that right dosey? 400 kilos in a box. Yeah. So that's eight boxes. So that's about three tons. Three tons. It'll dry about three tons of nuts in about a week with very low energy needs drying it in using this process and using this system.
The shelf life of the kernels can last one to two years. With most nuts, if you want them to be still edible after 2 years, you have to dry them. But if you dry them too quickly, if you dry them at too high a temperature, if you don't dry them properly, you're going to have all sorts of problems. So, we did a lot of work to figure out just how to do that just right. We also have experts at Griffith that have done a lot of the that really detailed processing and experts from the macadamia industry that really brought all their knowledge from global nut industries into how to do all of that product quality testing.
We were really lucky that we had a cracker that they were using in the macadamia industry that we brought it over. We modified the blades on it and hey presto was a really great way to crack the nuts so that we can crack a whole lot of nuts really quickly. Before this, people were cracking it with stones the traditional way. So, this was really about bringing that technology in to help to build the industry. The big thing with processing is knowing how to dry it and make it shelf stable.
So, after the nuts have been cracked, they come in here. This is where we do all the roasting and packaging of the Galip nut. We also had Adelaide University. They were able to get the big retailers on board and willing to try and give us shelf space to try our product and that that was a game changer. Without the Adelaide Uni team setting up that value chain and setting up those relationships with retailers, we wouldn't have gotten nowhere.
So we paved the way with the project. We demonstrated how this might work, how it might look, what sorts of things that would sell in the supermarkets, how the relationships with retailers would work. And then the real processes came in behind.
It more or less is a miracle how the project was able to add value to what is a native tree into what is now a commercial tree. My family and I have started this company so that we can have market access for our people in Madang province and other parts of Papiggoni.
Currently we have got about 20 farmer groups and those farmer groups have been trained in supply and value chain as well. We maintain quality from the tree all the way to the processing facility. So what we did was we started working with those people to help them to set up their own businesses selling Galip.
We were doing things like giving them advice on equipment, on how to train their farmers to keep good quality, giving them advice on packaging and processing and retailing and helping them to basically run their own show. We set up buying points where we can buy Galip nuts directly from farmers, and then we handle the roasting and packaging.
We currently have one major retailer that stocks our product on the shelves and that's CPL in the stop and shop outlets. We're currently working on our Galip nut butter and hopefully by the end of this year we'll have those on shelves as well.
Oh, good morning. We have 500 households. Most of our suppliers too are women. Galip is a good income. They can get maybe 500 kina from their five Gallip trees.
My name is Felicitas Bommo. Galip is very useful. It's another cash crop. Just now you go get it, go and sell it, get money, go and buy what you want. I buy food for the family, school fees, clothing. Sometimes the leftover money I went to the bank to put it to the bank in the bank for later use.
The good thing about our processes, they're all really focused on helping the local farming communities. They're really social enterprises. They're all about, how can I get more money to those women farmers or those community groups? How can I help them by giving them an outlet for their products?
Come on in. These are the Galip nuts that we currently use in most of our stuff. We use them as a substitute for nuts that we would use like imported stuff because a, they're here in country, b, we're supporting PNG, and c it's something different.
And we use them in Pestos and things like that. And it really gives us a point of differentiation. Like we've got a breakfast dish where we use the we do a pancake stack and it's banana and Galip nut. And our salmon dish on the menu as well. We do a crust with Galip nut. They do fly out the door, you know, and we get quite a bit of positive feedback. Obviously, it's good for the Papua New Guinians to be using a local product.
So, we see as kind of full circle in terms of everybody gaining a little bit out of it. Our end game was to get the private sector to run this industry. A lot of projects they say, here's this product, how can I sell it? Rather than saying okay what does the market want and then working backwards from that and also connecting up all the bits along the chain.
We produce two products a dry roasted kernel and a dry roasted kernel with Himalayan pink salt we've invested heavily in exhibiting at international food shows. In 2022 we attended the Paris international food show one of some 7,000 exhibitors.
It's the biggest show in the world and to our amazement we won the silent innovation award and so we now have identified distributors in Australia and the European Union and sales outlets in the UK and the USA.
One of the things that makes me so happy is whenever I'm going through customs, I see people carrying big boxes of Galip nut and they're taking it out of the country. They're taking it to their friends and family in other countries as a gift because it's a little taste of PNG and people love to get a little taste of home. That's how the macadamia industry started in Hawaii and now it's this huge global industry.
So, we want to get to the export. We it has potential but there's all these other things that need to happen to make that work but certainly with the domestic market it's existing now.
The funding was provided by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, also known as ACR, and they're a donor.
And what they do is they fund research that helps development. And they were really a partner with this because they would meet with us and we'd say, "Okay, this isn't working when we want to try that." And they're really helpful in terms of allowing us to try different things if something wasn't working.