Ban Hat Kai Toi Community

Ban Hat Kai Toi is a cashew-farming community in Tha Pla district, Uttaradit, made up of residents relocated after Sirikit Dam’s construction flooded their original land along the Nan River. Visiting the orchards and processing demonstrations is free, daily from 08:00 to 18:00.

The land the community was resettled onto — rocky, sloped, and drought-prone — couldn’t support the rice farming families had practised before. In 1977, authorities introduced cashew as an alternative: a tree crop that tolerates poor, dry soil where rice fails. The early years weren’t easy — cracking the shells without destroying the kernel proved difficult until two local growers, Boon and Boon Pisa, worked out a soak-boil-and-hand-crack method that also happened to produce a distinctly sweet, firm-textured nut, now the trait Tha Pla cashews are known for regionally.

That processing know-how grew into a proper community enterprise. It now turns out more than a dozen cashew products — salted and flavoured roasted kernels, cookies, cashew milk — holds FDA certification and Thailand’s OTOP 5-star rating (the top tier for community-made goods), and generates roughly 2.5 million THB a year in revenue. Profits are split between members, a community fund, member welfare, and public projects. Drying now runs on solar power rather than fuel, an upgrade developed with support from Thailand’s national electricity utility.

Visitors get an orchard walk-through and a look at the harvesting and processing chain from raw nut to finished product — worth timing for late March through May, when the harvest and processing season is at its busiest. If the village stall is out of what you want, the enterprise also runs Ban Himaphan, a two-storey retail outlet on the Uttaradit-Sirikit Dam road in Mueang district, stocking its “Queen”-branded cashews alongside other Uttaradit OTOP products.

Insider Tip: Buy directly from the community stall rather than a roadside shop elsewhere in Uttaradit — prices are the same but the sale supports the growers who developed the shelling process, and you’ll get the freshest batch.

The dam that displaced this community, Sirikit Dam, is a short drive away and worth combining with the visit. Both sit within Uttaradit province’s Tha Pla district.