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, in a not-very-large white building, was the Cadbury factory, and the aromas it exuded defined much of my growing up. (It cannot be a coincidence that vanilla is still one of my favourite smells.)

As I grew older, the factory moved to the suburbs and the white building became the office. 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. He was kind enough to take an inexperienced journalist seriously and explained that 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. But because he did not want to disappoint the many children who loved 'Cads', as the chocolate bar was nicknamed, 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. This was a familiar strategy already employed in many foreign countries: 5 Star was probably inspired by the Mars Bar.

The second strategy involved a higher degree of difficulty. Cadbury was trying to persuade Indian farmers to grow the cocoa bean so it was less dependent on imported chocolate. The problem, he said, was that the Indian bean just didn’t taste right when you turned it into chocolate. Experts from Cadbury UK had worked with local farmers, he said, and had managed to get around that problem. He thought that Cadbury would eventually be able to depend on Indian farmers for a substantial proportion of its chocolate needs.