This Hyderabad-born chocolate label will give Willy Wonka performance anxiety

The latest addition to the start-up city is Manam Chocolate, leveraging the power of blockchain technology to bring scale and transparency to the world of Indian craft chocolate

On one side of a glass partition a bespectacled woman tempers chocolate with meditative focus. Each stroke is precise and purposeful. Behind her on a wall are pinned illustrated notes that tell chefs like her just how their flavoured truffles—the words “sesame” and “curry leaf” stand out—should look like. The truffles are just one of the many confections being prepared within one’s visual range. Meanwhile, on the side of the partition where one is standing, in a brightly-lit, cavernous room, the air is ripe with the aroma of chocolate. As a pastry chef walks through a door, the fragrance of freshly baked bread wafts through. This space houses Manam Chocolate, a newly-opened Hyderabad-based craft chocolate brand whose product range could perhaps give Willy Wonka performance anxiety. There are nearly 300 products across 50 categories—single origin and custom-made chocolate tablets, cacao nib trail mixes, bonbons, nama, brownies, cakes, milkshakes, macaroons, ice creams, chikki, gianduja, babkas, entremets, savoury cruffins, croissants…well, you get the picture. Additionally, special attention is paid to dietary preferences with options such as oat milk for vegans and jaggery for those off processed sugar.

More than a bean-to-bar approach 

All of Manam Chocolate’s goodies are produced using chocolate made in-house and that, as any industry insider will ascertain, is quite ambitious, considering most craft chocolate makers in India don’t go beyond the bars and barks formula. “In my opinion, simply going from bean to bar is a flawed approach,” insists Chaitanya Muppala, Manam’s sparkly-eyed founder. “Our association with chocolate is not just with  a bar, it’s also with that Black Forest cake that our parents bought for us during our childhood. Or that Cornetto ice cream we ate, which had a dollop of chocolate at the bottom of the cone. We have these emotional associations with chocolate.” And it is precisely these emotional associations that Muppala, a certified chocolate taster, is banking on in his attempt to bring craft chocolate and the commerce of big business together. 

Over the next few years, Muppala aims to take Manam’s store-cum-chocolate lab-cum-café format to a national audience. The café  serves an excellent cold drip nitro coffee that is made by steeping coffee through  Manam’s single origin cacao. “In our business model we’ve also looked at the different consumer behaviours that drive buying patterns,” says the man who brings the experience of running Hyderabad’s successful Almond House, specialising in mithai and savouries, to chocolate. “When you're gifting [chocolate], you think of it differently, versus when you’re treating yourself,” he says. His intention is to ensure once you enter his store, there’s a treat that fulfills your every need. “Using the crafting of chocolate, our business model is designed to cover the entire range from harvest to cake.” The key word here is “harvest”. 

Understanding the nuances

Back in 2018 when Muppala began mapping the chocolate market, he discovered that most of the world’s popular, big-name brands buy their chocolate from “the same two-three multinationals,” add their spin to it and sell it forward.  There is little to no investment in chocolate’s core ingredient—the cacao beans it is produced from. “This was surprising to me,” he says, “because that doesn't make for a very sustainable differentiation in product.” According to him, “There are a handful of people that can genuinely say, and I'm talking globally, that they are a company that either have their own farms or source cacao nibs directly from farmers and make chocolate from it.” This nugget is from L Nitin Chordia, founder of Cocoashala, a Chennai-based bean-to-bar consultancy. For nearly a decade, he’s been training chocolate tasters and helping craft chocolate markets set up operations. Chordia reveals that industrial chocolate makers look for a certain consistent taste in their product and to achieve that, they add sugar and other legally permitted substances to it. “Sometimes there’s as little as 20 per cent cacao in a bar of chocolate,” he explains, “and then it makes no sense for them to invest in understanding the cacao they’re buying or working towards improving its quality.”

Patricia Cosma, co-founder of The Indian Cacao & Craft Chocolate Festival, points out that “most of the international craft chocolate brands are not based in countries where cacao grows. Some companies can afford to send a representative to be present when the beans are fermented and dried. But most companies have to make do with buying fermented and dried beans.” Chordia adds, “There are not many people across the world who ferment beans themselves purely because there isn’t enough expertise or knowledge on the subject. As someone who’s been involved in the process for nearly 10 years, I can tell you that we probably know about 20-25 per cent of what's happening during fermentation.”

Benefitting the farmers

This takes us back to the word “harvest”. To differentiate his chocolate from other brands in the market, Muppala decided to invest in the seed of chocolate—cacao. He created the ethically-minded cocoa bean company, Distinct Origins, and began sourcing beans directly from over 100 farmers in Andhra Pradesh’s West Godavari district—India’s largest cacao-growing region. Taking what knowledge there is globally with regards to fermentation, he built a fermenting unit. According to Muppala, it’s the second largest of its kind in the world. “This way, the farmer doesn’t have to worry about what happens to the fruit, but only about growing it right,” he explains, as we walk around the unit that’s housed in an Art Deco building surrounded by cacao farms near Tadikalapudi village in West Godavari. 

At the fermenting unit, harvested cacao pods are cracked open by hand, de-seeded, and left to evolve in wooden bins, with each connected to equipment that tracks and records data—including temperature, sugar, and acidity levels—right through the fermentation process. Data collected over the next several years, Muppala hopes, will help Manam and other chocolate makers who buy from Distinct Origins design the flavour profiles they want from their chocolate. Data also plays a key role in transparency. Stored in a blockchain that’s accessible to both farmer and consumer, it carries information on when a batch of cacao was procured from a farmer, who the farmer is, the location of their farm, what they were paid for it and when. “Through this entire exercise, the business model is designed in such a way that the profit pools better to the farm,” says Muppala. According to data published by the International Cacao Organization—the nodal body for the global chocolate industry—farmers make less than six per cent of the cost of a bar of chocolate. “When we trade directly with farmers, we try to pull profit to the tune of 20 to 25 per cent,” claims Muppala, “which is better for the farmer.”

Back at the store, Muppala puts a group of us journalists through an intense tasting session of his formulations—from near-bitter dark chocolate to sweeter milky ones. Having bitten into a piece of single origin chocolate, I haltingly react: “It reminds me of the taste of Dairy Milk.” Muppala, momentarily stops puffing at his vape, smiles, and replies, “That’s going to be a bestseller”. 

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