The Code of Hygienic Practice for Tree Nuts, formally designated CXC/CXP 6 within the Codex Alimentarius framework, is the joint FAO/WHO international document that explicitly names cashew (Anacardium occidentale) among the tree nuts it covers, and it functions as the foundational hygienic-practice standard that most national and regional cashew food-safety rules trace back to in one form or another. If the EU’s aflatoxin limits, the US FDA’s import alerts, and facility certifications like ISO 22000 all feel like a scattered patchwork of separate rules, understanding CXC/CXP 6 helps explain why they share so much underlying logic — they’re all downstream expressions of the same basic hygienic-practice principles Codex laid out first.
What Codex Alimentarius actually is
Codex Alimentarius is a joint programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), operating as the international body responsible for developing harmonised food standards, guidelines, and codes of practice intended to protect consumer health and ensure fair practices in the food trade globally. It doesn’t have direct legal enforcement power the way a national regulator does — Codex standards are not automatically binding law in any given country — but they carry substantial weight because national governments and regional bodies routinely draw on Codex documents when drafting their own domestic food-safety regulations, and Codex standards are explicitly recognised as reference points under World Trade Organization food-safety agreements. That gives Codex an outsized practical influence relative to its lack of direct enforcement authority.
What the Code of Hygienic Practice for Tree Nuts covers
CXC/CXP 6 targets the specific hazard pathway that leads to aflatoxin and other mycotoxin contamination in tree nuts — mould growth driven by inadequate moisture control — by setting out hygienic practice recommendations across the entire chain from harvest through primary processing, drying, storage, and transport. Critically, the code itself does not set specific numeric contaminant limits, such as a particular aflatoxin µg/kg ceiling; that kind of precise regulatory figure comes from national or regional bodies layered on top of the Codex baseline, such as the European Union’s aflatoxin limits under Regulation (EU) 2023/915, covered in detail on the EU import compliance page. What CXC/CXP 6 does instead is establish the hygienic-practice foundation — proper drying protocols, moisture monitoring, pest control, sanitary handling, and storage conditions — that keeps mould and mycotoxin risk low enough for those downstream numeric limits to be realistically achievable in the first place. Skip the hygienic-practice foundation, and no amount of end-of-line testing reliably fixes the underlying risk.
How it underpins national and regional limits
Because CXC/CXP 6 explicitly covers cashew by name, it functions as a shared reference point that national regulators across very different jurisdictions can point back to when justifying their own specific rules, even when those rules end up with different numeric thresholds. The EU’s aflatoxin tiers, the US FDA’s mycotoxin-related Import Alert 23-14 (discussed on the US FDA import requirements page), and even India’s general contaminant regulations covering cashew under its “foods not specified” categorisation (see the FSSAI regulatory status page) are all, in a meaningful sense, downstream expressions of the same underlying hygienic-practice logic that CXC/CXP 6 lays out at the international level — they simply attach different specific numbers and enforcement mechanisms to that shared foundation based on each jurisdiction’s own regulatory process and risk tolerance.
Why it’s the source document behind most food-safety certifications
Most of the food-safety-management certifications cashew processors actually pursue — HACCP-based systems, ISO 22000, and FSSC 22000, compared in detail on the Processing-Facility Certifications Compared page — are built around hazard-analysis and hygienic-practice principles that trace directly back to codes like CXC/CXP 6. HACCP itself (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) is in fact a methodology that Codex Alimentarius has formally endorsed and published guidance on, making the relationship between Codex and modern facility certification schemes especially direct rather than merely conceptual. Understanding this lineage is practically useful, not just academically interesting: a processor who understands why a certification auditor asks about moisture monitoring at a specific processing stage, or why storage humidity records matter as much as final product testing, is working from the same underlying logic the auditor’s checklist was built on — rather than treating certification requirements as an arbitrary checklist imposed from outside. That’s also directly relevant to farm-level standards like GlobalG.A.P., which extend hygienic-practice thinking back further upstream to the orchard itself, before the nuts ever reach a processing facility. Processors implementing this from scratch will find the practical plant-level version of the same logic on the HACCP-certified cashew plant page.
Why this matters even though it’s rarely cited directly
Very few cashew industry resources cite CXC/CXP 6 by name, even though its influence runs through nearly every food-safety rule and certification scheme that touches cashew processing. For a processor building out a food-safety programme, or an exporter trying to understand why buyers keep asking similar-sounding questions across different regulatory regimes, going back to this foundational document — rather than treating each downstream rule as a standalone, disconnected requirement — makes the whole compliance landscape considerably easier to navigate coherently.
This page summarises the Codex Alimentarius framework for general reference. It is not a substitute for direct guidance from a qualified food-safety consultant on how to implement hygienic-practice standards at a specific facility.