Most roasted nuts use oil to hold the seasoning on. We use maple syrup. It goes on before the nuts are roasted, it caramelizes onto them in the heat, and it sets into a coating that grips the spice. The sweetness is a side effect. The binding is the point.
What is oil actually doing on a roasted nut?
Not much for flavor. Refined seed oils are close to neutral by design, since the refining that makes them shelf-stable also strips out most of what they taste like. On a flavored nut, oil is doing mechanical work. It wets the surface so ground spice has something to cling to, and it carries that spice evenly across the batch instead of leaving half the bag bare.
It is a reasonable solution. It is cheap, it is neutral, and it works. It also means the second or third ingredient on the bag is something the recipe does not need for taste, and on most labels you cannot tell which oil it is. We wrote about that here.
What does maple syrup do instead?
The same job, by a different route. Maple syrup is mostly sugar dissolved in water. We coat the raw nuts in it before they go into the roaster. As they heat, the water cooks off and the sugars caramelize onto the surface of the nut, which is where the browning and the toasted edge come from.
What is left behind is not a wet glaze. It is a thin set coating with the spice locked into it. Za'atar does not sit loose in the bottom of the bag. Curry leaf does not shake off onto your desk. The maple is holding it there.
That coating is also why the nuts stay crisp. Sugar sets hard where oil stays soft.
Why maple and not honey or cane sugar?
Both would bind. Neither would get out of the way.
Honey is aggressively sweet and it has a strong flavor of its own that sits on top of everything else. Put honey on a za'atar cashew and you taste honey with something underneath it. Cane sugar binds fine and tastes like nothing but sweet, which is a different problem: it adds nothing and it flattens the blend.
Dark maple has flavor without dominance. It brings a caramel and toasted note that sits under the spice rather than over it. On a curry leaf cashew, the curry leaf still leads. That is the whole reason it is worth the cost.
And it counts as one ingredient. Maple syrup, on the label, is maple syrup.
Where the maple comes from
An upstate New York farm. We buy dark, late-season syrup rather than the pale early-season kind, because the darker grades carry more of the caramel and toasted character we want and the lighter ones are too delicate to survive a roast.
What this costs us
Maple syrup is four times the price of refined seed oil per pound. That difference is most of why a Sivaro pouch costs what it does, and we would rather say so than pretend the price is about something else.
It also means our nuts carry sugar where an oil-roasted nut would carry fat. If you are watching sugar rather than fat, that is a real trade and you should make it knowingly. The nutrition panel on every bag has the number.
On a Sivaro label
Sivaro Snacks is a small-batch nut and dried fruit brand in Queens, New York, founded in 2021 and operated by Sano Nuts and Dry Fruit LLC. Every product is roasted in real New York maple syrup with no seed oils, and every ingredient is named on the label. Sivaro is MWBE, ACDBE, and NMSDC certified.
Za'atar Cashews. Cashews, Maple Syrup, Za'atar Herb (Origanum Syriacum), Sumac Spice, Roasted White Sesame Seeds, Unrefined Sea Salt, Rice Fiber, White Vinegar.
Maple syrup is the second ingredient, ahead of the entire spice blend. On an oil-roasted version of the same product, that slot belongs to something you cannot taste.
If it doesn't belong in a home kitchen, it doesn't go in the bag.
See it on the label
Every flavor, with the full ingredient list on each page.
More from Read the Label: Why we roast in maple syrup instead of seed oil · the full index.
Last reviewed: August 11, 2026