Crafting A Desi Chocolate Story

Award-winning Manam Chocolate is putting India on the world cacao map - to delicious effect. By Primrose Monteiro-D'Souza

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A little boy thrusts a glass dish of earthworms at us.

His grandfather Boyapati Venkateswara Rao looks on proudly as eight-year-old Neehal runs his fingers gently through the worms. We are on a 12-acre organic multi-cropping farm in Andhra Pradesh's West Godavari District on which mango, coconut, pepper, and arecanut grow - all infusing their flavours into the cacao fruits that grow among them. Three generations - BV Rao, his son Sai and Neehal - have now been working with the bean for 20 years.

Cacao came to India in the 1960s. Most of what is produced goes to the confectionery giants - with the emphasis on productivity and yield, not flavour. When you think of the cacao-growing regions of the world, India does not spring to mind. But that is changing. Chaitanya Muppala, founder of Manam Chocolate and CEO of Distinct Origins (a sister concern of Manam Chocolate), is putting India on the world cacao map in two ways – by assisting and supporting member farmers in better agri practices, and by establishing science-backed proprietary post-harvesting processes to draw the best flavours from the existing cacao beans grown in the region. Making sense of the “genetic orgy” that cocoa production has been over the last 70 years is a challenge he has embraced since he started working on this in 2018. With a family history as makers of premium mithai, he is using technology in processing to compensate for the lack of flavour profile that is a result of the indiscriminate cross pollination. “We've scienced the sh*t out of it,” he says. Chaitanya wants India to be counted as a premium cacao-growing country, and he's making it happen from the ground up.

A Collective For Cacao