A Geeky Makeover For Indian Cacao

The wide appeal of Ferrero Rocher is that it is a “super sweet chocolate paired with a very familiar nut”, Chaitanya Muppala says, explaining why even the neighbourhood chemist now stocks this once aspirational Italian brand. “Fundamentally, we are palate people.” 

Muppala’s palate was never moved by the sweets he grew up around, courtesy his father’s Almond House mithai store in Hyderabad. “My biggest challenge scaling a mithai business was that I don’t understand why people buy this stuff,” he says. Yet when he took over in 2013, he expanded that business successfully. And despite not being an appreciative mithai consumer, he says, he was able to transfer the “pedagogy” of his learnings to his new love, chocolates.

Well, sort of. His favourite is a no-frills 100% dark single origin chocolate bar that he launched last year on Aug. 15, a decade after taking over Almond House. It’s probably the most pared down of his 300 plus products that range from a Chai Biscuit Tablet to Creamy Coconut Thins. Chocolate already accounts for 40% of his overall business. “I make chocolate the way we like it,” he says. By that he means super smooth, velvety, chocolatey-chocolate in a never-ending variety of iterations.

Manam’s Hyderabad store or chocolate karkhana—a wonderland of sweetness—was just featured in Time magazine’s ‘World’s Greatest Places 2024’ for putting “Indian-grown cacao on the global stage”. Two other Indians made it to this list: Kashmiri chef Prateek Sadhu, who exited Mumbai to set up Himalayan cuisine restaurant Naar in Himachal Pradesh; and Tanvi Jindal Shete, founder of the 1,00,000 sq ft children-focussed Museum of Solutions in Mumbai.

The self-taught chocolate geek wants to make his mark in the Rs 5,000 crore premium chocolate market (a little less than a third of the overall market), snaring in his net anyone who has carried back a suitcase of chocolates from their travels abroad in previous decades. That’s actually Muppala’s chocolate memory from the 1990s. 

He began looking at the chocolate business because of the shifting sensibility of consumers towards ‘western’ taste and the “inherent challenge” of scaling mithai, a perishable product. Plus, regional players dominate the mithai market and his instinct told him that despite robust industry growth, revenue growth was likely to slow. “We took what used to be sold at the corner thela and started selling it in a jewellery store but we have done zilch for the product,” he says, about the lack of innovation in mithai. 

One of the first things Muppala realised when he decided to diversify into chocolate was that a homogenous product was being marketed by several different ‘bean to bar’ brands. “I realised that anyone who is doing anything in chocolate in India, whether it’s premium, retail or gifting, they are all buying the same raw material, melting it, moulding it, putting their sea salt, their nuts and calling it their chocolate.” Essentially, anyone with a chocolate melanger—or “idly-grinder from Coimbatore” as Muppala describes it—could jump into the business. The next question to answer was where these beans were coming from.  

He launched a two-and-a-half year exploration among farmers in the West Godavari region, the nearest cacao growing region to Hyderabad. “The wind took me there,” he says, poetically. He decided to start from the fruit rather than the bean. And in 2021, he began building an ambitious cacao fermentary in Tadikalapudi.

“Our purple friend” comes up frequently in conversation. Muppala of course is referring to Cadburys, its Dairy Milk being the singular image most Indians think of when asked to recall early chocolate memories. It’s also the company that brought cacao to India in the 1960s, albeit the industrial variety not exactly known for its fine flavour.  Back then, farmers called it the Cadbury tree. 

Manam uses data and post-harvest processing systems to makeover the basic Indian cacao bean and compensate for its “lack of fine flavour genetics”. “We do a lot of geekery around it, at scale,” says Muppala. “We monitor pH values, temperature, soil genetics, terroir and use science and data to arrive at a great bean.” 

He has a talk that he gives often about the dark history of chocolate, its relationship to colonialism and slavery, a story that he promises will wean you off most brands. “You’ll never buy a Godiva, Lindt or Cadbury again,” he says. Manam’s story is thus far a squeaky clean one of partnering with 120 farmers who grow cacao on 3,000 acres. Their names feature on the chocolate bars. 

This past year, Muppala says he has learned a few lessons. Like the one about not forgetting children. “We’ve built a very adult brand and we missed out on capitalising the magic of chocolate for children,” he says. “We want to bring fun into it.”

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of NDTV Profit or its editorial team.