The tagua that I use is imported from Central American countries by a group called OneWorld Projects. They are quite wonderful IMO because they have worked hard to turn the harvesting and marketing of tagua into a sustainable rainforest based industry. They market other third world products made from renewable materials as well.

You can see their web site here at One World Projects. It shows a lot of products made from tagua and also has a few photos of the nuts. Since I last looked at it though they have taken down some of the great photos in favor of more sales information. Sigh...

The taguas grow in huge aggregations of pods, roughly spherical and about the size of a beach ball. They're called cabezas (heads, in Spanish, I believe.) Each cabeza is made up of many pods; each pod has 5 or 6 taguas in it.

When they are new they are edible, the inside is a kind of gel. I've seen photos of huge piles of edible taguas in the marketplace. They get very hard as they dry. Some get brownish but most of them turn a lovely ivory color or stay fairly white.

Well this is probably more than anyone wants to know about it, huh?