Daily Mixed Nuts and Dry Fruit

Details

One jar for the morning handful, so you are not opening five packs. The ratio is fixed and printed on the pack: almond 30 percent, cashew 20, walnut halves 15, black raisin 20 and dried apricot 15, weighed to it in every lot. That matters more here than anywhere else on this shelf, because a mix is where filler hides. Once five things are tumbled together nobody can tell what share each one is, and the cheapest ingredient quietly grows. Groundnut is the classic, because it costs a fraction of a cashew, sits close enough in a jar of mixed shapes, and carries an aflatoxin risk that tree nuts do not. Raisin is the other, since it is the cheapest thing here by weight, and a jar that is a third raisin costs the packer far less than the jar you thought you were buying. The third move is breakage, splits and chips and walnut pieces counted at whole-kernel prices. The fourth is silent and continuous: the ratio simply gets re-cut whenever one input has a bad year, and nothing on the label ever has to change.

• No groundnut, no peanut, no melon seed and no other cheap seed
• Ratio printed on the pack and weighed per lot, not adjusted to input prices
• No splits, chips or broken pieces used to make up a nut share
• Raw and unsalted, no oil, no roasting and no sugar coating
• No sulphur, no syrup glaze and no mineral oil on the fruit
• Peroxide value and aflatoxin tested per lot
• The apricots are brown, not orange, because orange is what sulphur does to a dried apricot
• Walnut is the shortest-lived thing in the jar, so the whole mix carries the walnut's shelf life rather than the almond's
• It is drier and less glossy than a coated mix, and the raisins will clump together