Increased Revenue with High Value-Added Products from Cashew Apple (Anacardium occidentale L.)-Addressing Global Challenges

Among the agro-based industries, the cashew industry utilizes only about 30% of the total fruit as food material, and the rest goes as a waste. Valorizing the generated waste into value-added products is the better option to address the waste. The waste generated from these industries needs to be valorized into value-added products. Anacardium occidentale, cashew, has a booming market worldwide. Being a tropical tree, small farmers are the major source of cultivation in countries that come to light, and capitalization on cashew by-product has colossal potential that can benefit agribusiness. Many value-added products like reducing sugars, bioethanol, xylitol, organic acids, and biohydrogen are produced lately. Looking at the feasibility of producing value-added products, commercializing the biorefineries on an industrial scale is in the burgeoning phase around the globe. Upgrading the laboratory phase research to a larger commercial scale has been the key research. A total of 2376 patent publications and 586 scientific publications were available on cashew apple and nuts among the available publications to date. The potentiality of the cashew in the biorefinery concept is put front by these statistics. The present review focuses on spotlighting the use of cashew and their potential use in agribusiness.