Story By: Martha Cheng Photo By: Steve
Czerniak
Poor macadamia nuts. While almonds and walnuts bask in the health food
spotlight, touted as snacks for the svelte, macadamia nuts are the fat nuts,
covered in chocolate and sold as candy, or buried in cream and custard and
served as dessert. “Consumers do not view mac nuts as healthy,” says Scott
Wallace, president of Royal Hawaiian Orchards, which has been growing mac nuts
on Hawai‘i Island for sixty years. “We’ve done the research and it’s kind of
amazing. You would think because they know almonds, walnuts and pistachios are
good for you, they would infer the same of mac nuts. But mac nuts they view as
unhealthy and full of fat because they’re traditionally offered in indulgent
forms—mac nut cream pie, mac nut cookies, chocolate-covered mac nuts.” Dig them
out of dessert, however, and mac nuts have something to offer health nuts, like
monounsaturated fats, the same good fats found in olive oil.
Enter the macadamia nut
makeover. Royal Hawaiian recently launched a “Don’t hate me because I’m
delicious” ad campaign and debuted some salubrious new products, like mac nuts
dipped in dark chocolate and paired with superfoods like goji and açaí. It’s
currently petitioning the Food and Drug Administration to allow its labels to
say that mac nuts can lower the risk for heart disease. If the petition
succeeds, it will give a big boost to Royal Hawaiian’s newest product: mac nut
milk. With a nutritional profile similar to almond milk, the darling of nut
milks, mac nut milk carries a whisper of the buttery creaminess that mac nuts
are famous for. Nut milks are in such demand these days that Royal Hawaiian
couldn’t find a nut milk processing plant in California that wasn’t at maximum
capacity, so it has to send its nuts all the way to Minnesota.
When it comes to producing
nut milks, it’s go big or go home: Processing facilities don’t deal in small
batches, which is why Royal Hawaiian is already making a million cartons of mac
nut milk a year. You can expect mac nut milk mustaches from Honolulu to
Manhattan as the company expands its distribution beyond the Islands (where
it’s sold at Island Naturals Market, Longs Drugs, Don Quijote, Target and
Kmart) to Safeway, Whole Foods and other super-markets nationwide. In the
meantime, cheers to a cold glass of mac nut milk. Just hold the mac nut cookie.
royalhawaiianorchards.com |