Exiting the business of making snacks from macadamia nuts helped local farm Royal Hawaiian Orchards LP earn a profit in the first quarter after a year-earlier loss.

Hilo-based Royal Hawaiian reported earning $3 million in the January-March period compared with a $383,000 loss in the same quarter last year, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week.

Most of the income was from a $2.4 million profit from selling assets that Royal Hawaiian used to make and sell a line of retail snacks. That sale was completed in March to rival snack maker MacFarms LLC, a subsidiary of Australian-based Buderim Group Ltd. The sale provided Royal Hawaiian with 11.2 million stock shares in Buderim as payment, though the transaction value was reported as income.

As part of that sale agreement, Royal Hawaiian is supplying MacFarms with raw mac nuts and processing services.

Royal Hawaiian, which was established in 1986 and is the biggest mac nut farm in the state with about 5,400 acres of trees on Hawaii island, branched out into the snack business six years ago with the goal of improving income by reducing its reliance on more volatile prices for raw mac nuts the company sells wholesale. But the endeavor was costly to develop and distribute products that included a dozen varieties of flavored nuts and fruit-and-nut clusters along with macadamia butter, macadamia milk and dark-chocolate-­covered macadamias.

The company announced the snack business sale plan in March, and during the same month also announced a plan to remove shares in the company from stock exchange trading.

The move to become a private company has not yet been completed. It involves buying out shareholders who own fewer than 2,000 shares in Royal Hawaiian, which is a partnership majority-owned by Denver investor and former Quark Software Inc. CEO Farhad “Fred” Ebrahimi. The small shareholders would receive $1.78 million for about 730,000 shares, or $2.41 per share.

Shares in Royal Hawaiian closed Tuesday at $2.35.