AN HOUR OUTSIDE VIJAYAWADA,
in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, lies the delta of the Godavari River. Small towns with musical names — Jalipudi, Eluru, Ganguru — dot this fertile landscape, ringed by farmland so intensely green they say it cools the eyes. There are lush paddies and sugarcane fields, thick stands of banana and coconut trees. And flourishing alongside them is a newer crop: cacao.
“After eating our chocolate, you will never touch a Lindt or Godiva again,” says Chaitanya Muppala with the bravado of a startup founder, which he is. Tall and loose-limbed, the thirtysomething Hyderabad-based entrepreneur is the man behind Manam Chocolate, a new craft chocolate brand that aims to overturn the poor reputation of Indian cacao.
On this balmy March morning, he is sitting under a ficus tree chatting with his cacao farmers over milky ginger chai. He inquires after their families, they talk shop about crops, he tells a young second-generation farmer to ride shotgun with him and learn about the world of fine-flavor cacao.
Muppala says that when he first started working with the farmers of the West Godavari district 15 years ago, he inherited an “orgy of varietals.” The farmers were intercropping cacao with coconut, areca nut, and pepper. The focus was to increase the yield to sell to mass-market companies like Cadbury and Nestle. So there were accidental hybrids, haphazard planting, and zero respect for terroir and the complex flavors that craft chocolate required.
“It took a long time to convince them to join the craft chain rather than the mass-market bandwagon,” Muppala recalls. Today, Manam gets its cacao from about 150 farmers, who together cultivate some 1,200 hectares. Manam’s single-estate chocolate bars bear a few of their names, such as Tablet No. 3, made of 68 percent dark chocolate from beans grown on the farm of one G.V.S. Prasad in the village of Tadikalapudi. Traceability and provenance are key to the company’s mission.
“We want to make craft chocolate, but we don’t want to be elitist,” explains Muppala, who has found many ways to showcase the brand’s collaborative relationship with its suppliers, starting with its name: manam means “us” in Telugu. Last year, when he inaugurated his shiny new workshop, lab, and retail space in Hyderabad’s affluent Banjara Hills neighborhood, he invited farmers to show up on their tractors, cut a ribbon, and ceremoniously enter the store. A couple hours later, the police showed up because the lines outside had become unmanageable. “Fine-flavor cacao and craft chocolate is still quite new in India,” says Muppala with a wry smile. An understatement.
Later, he brings me to Manam’s cacao “fermentery” in nearby Tadikalapudi. Once a tobacco warehouse, the facility has been retrofitted to process cacao. Outside, some 30 women in a rainbow of sarees sit in a group breaking open cacao pods and removing the pulp by hand. They chat, sing, and laugh among themselves. Inside, wooden crates lined with banana leaves contain fermenting cacao pulp. Each crate and drying rack has codes identifying the name of the farm, farmer, yields, and farming practices. “The data enables us to know exactly where our cacao comes from,” Muppala says. Such obsessive tracking underscores Muppala’s quest for an Indian cacao varietal that can hold its own against the best in the world.
ACCORDING TO NITIN CHORDIA, India’s first certified chocolate taster and founder of sustainable chocolate band Kocoatrait, “So far India has had the unfortunate reputation of our cacao beans being not good enough.” It is this impression that South India’s passionate craft chocolate makers want to change.
The new highway from Bengaluru (where I live) to Mysuru gets you to Naviluna Artisan Chocolate in just over an hour. When founder David Belo moved here from London in 2012, it used to take three hours. Belo originally came to this former royal city in southern Karnataka on a break from his life in London working in restaurants. When a friend brought some cacao beans from Gokarna on the Karnatakan coast, he had the glimmering of an idea — and never left. Today, Naviluna is housed in a charming heritage bungalow with stained-glass windows, a café, and a bright yellow house in the back where the chocolate is made. Choosing Mysuru was a smart move, as it grants access to quality ingredients from farmers who come into the city from the Konkan Coast, neighboring Bandipur Forest, and the foothills of the Western Ghats. The slow-paced tenor of the town also allows for an insouciance that’s distinct from the precision that lies at the heart of Western-style chocolate making.
Naviluna (the name means “peacock” in Kannada) embraces the bird’s flamboyance, adding ingredients such as Gondhoraj lime, longum pepper, purple jamuns, as well as the famous local Nanjangud banana (now under threat from disease) in its chocolates. “We focus on a terroir-centric approach to chocolate making with an aim of showcasing the unique flavor profile of Indian cacao,” Belo tells me. And what is that profile?
Two years ago, in November 2022, I attended the first Indian Cacao and Craft Chocolate Festival in Bengaluru. Even though I ate chocolates, I had no idea what craft chocolate was and found the word “artisanal” overused. At Bangalore International Centre where the festival happened, a crowd of us sampled chocolate from 30 brands. The two cofounders, a Romanian chocolate consultant named Patricia Cosma and Mumbaibased chocolatier Ketaki Churi, talked about what made Indian cacao special, which all boiled down to the biodiverse conditions in which it grows.
“India has a lot of hybrid cacao varieties growing in different soil, altitudes, and weather conditions,” Cosma said. “All of this results in amazingly diverse flavors, from fruity — like bananas and red berries — to earthy, floral, and spicy.”
I came out carrying nearly 30 bars of chocolate from different makers. Some had a depth of taste that I had never encountered in the duty-free chocolate