Nut trees in agroforestry systems have huge potential to improve livelihoods in developing countries. Currently, only five species of nuts make up 90% of world trade even though global demand for and consumption of nuts has doubled in the last decade. Many indigenous nut species have been domesticated in traditional agroforestry systems but have not been commercialised. Canarium indium is an indigenous agroforestry tree of the South Pacific that provides nuts with high nutritional value, along with timber and shade for crop plants. This species has cultural significance to the coastal communities of Papua New Guinea and has been traditionally processed for thousands of years. We report on a series of projects that have developed semi-commercial processing methods for nuts of C. indicum (galip), in Papua New Guinea. Research over two decades has developed systems that can be scaled up and adapted to large scale processing. The key challenges that needed to be solved were systems and processes for depulping, cracking and drying. We, hence, developed a variety of methods for both small scale and larger scale operations. In 2015, we set up a demonstration factory based on our processing research and tested the market demand for C. indicum nuts in Papua New Guinea. The demonstration factory more than doubled production of processed nut products each year and over 1300 farmers and entrepreneurs were selling to the demonstration factory by the end of 2018. Over 2000 smallholders are now participating in the emerging canarium industry in Papua New Guinea, and this new industry has already improved livelihoods of smallholder farmers in PNG.