LEETON'S burgeoning walnut industry looks set for a major boost with a $10 milllion nut cracking plant in the pipeline.
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The facility, which is still in the concept phase, has been approved by Walnuts Australia's board and is planned to begin operating in March 2014.
The creation of the plant will see a significant boost in employment with an extra 16 full-time positions to be created.
Walnuts Australia operations manager Derek Goullet expected that figure to rise once production increased.
"With all the packaging and cracking we will need to employ at least another 16 people in the initial stages and then as volumes and demand on the cracking plant increase our numbers on top of that will increase," he said.
"We are going to continue to expand the walnuts business and in doing that we have decided to go ahead with the conceptual plan of putting in a cracking line."
The new plant will enable the walnuts to not only be cracked, but also graded and dried at the one facility.
"We will be doing everything from in-shell packaging, cracking the walnuts for kernel production and potentially wanuts will go straight into retail packaging from the site," Mr Goullet said.
Currently the walnuts are contracted out to be cracked in Vietnam before returning to Australia to be sold.
Mr Goullett said that having the production facilities on one site enables greater control of quality and food safety and they will be able to reach consumers faster.
"Australian consumers prefer to purchase kernel than purchase an inshell walnut so we are just trying to grow the domestic market and increase demand for walnuts.
"We are trying to ensure that people are buying Australian walnuts rather than imported walnuts."
The size of walnut orchards in the region will also be dramatically increased with Walnuts Australia purchasing a Tabbita property, near their current property, with potentially 1000 more hectares of trees to be planted.
The current Tabbita orchard is 910 hectares with Leeton holdings now up to 765 hectares.
Currently nuts produced locally are graded and dried in a temporary facility in Griffith but once the new plant is running those facilities will move permanently to the Leeton site.
Around 20 people are currently employed by Walnuts Australia at the Griffith facility.
Current plantings returned 11,000 tonnes of walnuts and with the increased orchard that number is expected to increase to up to 17,000 tonnes.