What is Tagua?
Pronunciation: tah-gwuh
Tagua is a nut from a South American palm fruit that is also known as Corozo, or "vegetable ivory" because of its hardness and color resemblance to that of animal ivory.
RAW MATERIAL ORIGINS
The Magnificent Spiky Fruit
Tagua nuts comes from a magnificent, spiky fruit called the Moccocha that hangs in the palm trees of the Ecuadorian Andean rainforest.
Within the forest, male palm trees with fascinating long strands of flowered buds germinate nearby female palm trees with its pollen. Eventually female palm trees produce these Moccocha spiky fruit.
Each large Moccocha fruit contains 20-30 clusters filled with pockets of milky endosperm.
The fruit takes about 3 months to fully mature, where once pockets of endosperm are now hardened completely into what we know as Tagua nuts.
Finally, the hanging Moccocha fruit naturally fall to the ground, where the Tagua nuts are collected by forest dwellers for further processing into Corozo button blanks, handcrafts or jewelry.