No bitter memories

We finally have Indian chocolate, grown from Indian beans, on Indian soil. The local win tastes sweeter, it doesn't come with an aftertaste of exploitation either

- VIR SANGHVI

Chocolate is the smell of my childhood. I would wake up every morning to chocolate aromas wafting up to the top of Mumbai’s Cumballa Hill where I lived. On Peddar Road, at the bottom of the hill, was the Cadbury factory, and the aromas it exuded defined much of my growing up. (Vanilla is still one of my favourite smells.)

As I grew older, the factory moved to the suburbs. But they kept the bungalow next to it, where the managing director lived.

In my early years as a journalist, I was once sent to interview the British MD of Cadbury in that bungalow. One of the biggest challenges in his job was keeping the prices of such popular Cadbury brands as Fruit & Nut low because Cadbury imported chocolate, and global prices were volatile. The company had evolved two strategies. The first was to create bars that used less of the expensive chocolate: The 5 Star was one example.

The second strategy involved trying to persuade Indian farmers to grow the cocoa bean. The problem, he said, was that the Indian bean just didn’t taste right when you turned it into chocolate.

This was forty or so years ago. Because the gobbledygook had yet to be invented, he did not use such expressions as farm-to-table or bean-to-bar or talk about Cadbury’s commitment to Indian farmers or about localisation and carbon miles. His focus was on keeping chocolate prices low enough for children to be able to enjoy them.