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's a reasonable solution. It's cheap and it works. It also means the second or third ingredient on the bag is something the recipe doesn't need for taste, and on most labels you can't 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 oven. 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's left behind isn't a wet glaze. It's a thin, set coating with the spice locked into it. Za'atar doesn't sit loose in the bottom of the bag, and curry leaf doesn't 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. Each brings something we don't always want.
Honey has a strong flavor of its own. In our Golden Toasted Coconut Cashews that's exactly what we're after, so a little honey goes in with the maple. On a za'atar cashew it would sit on top of the herbs. Cane sugar binds fine but tastes like nothing except sweet, and it flattens a spice blend.
Maple has flavor without taking over. It brings a caramel, toasted note that sits under the spice. On a curry leaf cashew, the curry leaf still leads.
And it counts as one ingredient. Maple syrup, on the label, is maple syrup.
Where the maple comes from
Upstate New York farms. 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
Pound for pound, maple syrup costs us several times what refined seed oil would. That's part of why a Sivaro pouch costs what it does, and we'd rather say so.
It also means our nuts carry some sugar where an oil-roasted nut would carry more fat. If you're watching sugar, that's a real trade, and the nutrition panel on every bag has the numbers.
On a Sivaro label
Sivaro Snacks is a small-batch nut and dried fruit brand in Queens, New York. Our nuts are roasted in New York maple syrup with no seed oils, our dried fruit has no added sulfites, and every ingredient is 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 usually goes to an oil you can't 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: How to spot seed oils on a snack label · the full index.
Last reviewed: October 11, 2026