Why a Hyderabad chocolatier is putting farmers’ names on its chocolate bars

In Wonka, the 2023 film starring Timothée Chalamet, a young Willy Wonka crafts the Hoverchoc, an exquisite chocolate with a champagne-coloured outer layer, made of a measured mix of Peruvian marshmallows, cherries from Japanese Imperial gardens, and caramel sourced from Russian clowns’ tears. The Hoverchoc carries the magical power to make anyone who wolfs it down fly. While the offerings of Manam Chocolate, a homegrown Indian craft chocolate-make, may not induce literal levitation, they do leave consumers with a euphoric sense of delight. Manam, which has received recognition at the International Chocolate Awards and the Academy of Chocolate Awards, turns three this month.

At its helm is a visionary entrepreneur: Chaitanya Muppala. The 35-year-old whom Hello! recently called India’s very own Willy Wonka, is determined to raise the standards of craft chocolate in India and bring it on par with the most reputed names in the world, like Lindt, Godiva and Valrhona. Muppala isn’t alone in this mission. Through Manam’s sibling arm Distinct Origins, he has built an army of over 300 farmers who labour across 3,000 acres of fertile land in West Godavari, Andhra Pradesh. These farmers cultivate the finest, Indian-born cacao beans, says Muppala. In Telugu, Manam means ‘we’ or ‘us’, and this craft chocolate brand is rooted in that ideology.

Like Wonka’s artisanal factory full of fantastical enchantments, the Manam Chocolate Karkhana in Hyderabad (listed in Time magazine’s World’s Greatest Places for 2024), too, plays with imagination. Spread across 10,000 sq ft, at this immersive craft chocolate factory you can pick up roasted cacao nibs flavoured with candied ginger, pumpkin seeds and dried apricots, or bite into mint-and matcha-chocolate thins that come in dainty capsule-sized tin boxes. Here, you can even make your own chocolate and eat it too.

The farmer and the bean stock

While chocolate-making has evolved through technical innovation and complex flavours and textures, concerns regarding the environment and ethical farming continue to persist.

In 2005, Tony’s Chocolonely in the Netherlands started with a mission to become a Fairtrade-certified chocolate company that ends modern slavery and illegal child labour in the cocoa industry. Today, it’s a practice more chocolate manufacturers are hoping to adopt. In India, craft chocolate brands like Mason & Co, Paul and Mike, Anuttama and Naviluna are known to source their cacao from farms across Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala. 

But Manam hopes to go further by not only supporting small farmers but building a proper infrastructure it believes is needed to improve the quality and global reputation of the Indian cacao. “Chocolate is only as good as your beans,” explains Muppala. Which means that instead of purchasing the poorly dried, low-quality beans from the middlemen, Manam’s sister company, Distinct Origins, buys the ochre-hued pods directly from the local farmers. “We realised we needed control of the entire chain to ensure quality. So, our chocolate-making starts on the farm with the genetics, terroir, quality farming, and harvesting practices,” says Muppala.

Distinct Origins’ primary operations focus on working closely with select farmers in West Godavari to produce high-quality cacao beans. “We oversee the harvest and make sure the right fruits are picked,” he continues. The pods are then carefully opened at the Distinct Origins fermentery at Tadikalapudi (said to be one of the largest facilities in the world), where the silky, white, sweet pulp and the bitter beans undergo proprietary drying, sorting, and fermentation processes to unlock their true flavour.

Closing the loop

The pod shells are reused as well. At the fermentation unit, the discarded shells are composted in a swimming-pool-sized pit, where they’re dried, mulched, and broken down into a nutrient-rich natural fertiliser. “And we give that to farmers. To those who want to create their own manure, we return the shells. This helps us close the ecological loop,” explains Muppala.

In traditional markets, farmers often wait six to eight weeks to receive compensation for their cacao beans. Distinct Origins ensures that not only are the farmers rewarded with a premium for following quality protocols, they also receive the payment digitally within just 24 hours. “Another incentive is that we take away all the costs,” says Muppala. “Our belief is that the farmer should focus on the soil, the tree, the farm, and not the post-harvest processes. We take over the fermentation, which is labour-intensive and expensive.” He adds, “In essence, it’s child-labour-free, deforestation-free, and fairly transacted cacao.”

Sweet disposition

Muppala belongs to a family whose legacy is anchored in the confectionary-making. His family established Almond House in Hyderabad in 1989, a celebrated mithai shop known for its festive sweets and classic savoury nibbles. Muppala saw a curious gap in the confectionary sphere. Even as India began embracing the niche culture of artisanal beer, farmstead cheese, and single-origin coffee, Muppala noticed that craft chocolate hadn’t quite caught up. The space, while still nascent, was brimming with promise.

It sent him down a rabbit hole. He spent more than two years engaging with farmers and exploring the cacao-rich land of West Godavari, cacao pods grow on a short theobroma cacao tree, under the shade of coconut trees and alongside areca nut and long pepper. “We learned from the farmers what they did. Through them, we understood the story of cacao, not just within the context of India but also globally,” he recalls.

Building a network of nearly 300 farmers didn’t come easy. When he began Manam, Muppala had only three farmers on board. Convincing the rest took time. “At first, it was tough,” he admits. “I was just a city boy talking about something I didn’t know much about. The farmers were sceptical.” Trust, he says, came through persistence. “You live with them, eat with them, share your struggles, they share theirs. Then you start buying. You pay. You recognise their work. You honour their labour. Slowly, they see that this isn’t fluff. That’s how real relationships are built. And it takes years.”

Still, at no point did Muppala question whether India was ready for a craft chocolate movement or whether the idea was too ambitious. “You have to be a little bit delusional to do things like this,” he muses. “You lose track of reality and, before you know it, you’ve spent too much time and effort not to make it work.”

What sets Manam apart from other Indian craft chocolate brands isn’t that it works closely with farmers (other chocolate-makers do that too), but the scale of what it’s trying to build around cacao in India. From the farm and the fermentation shed, to the chocolate factory and traceability, Manam’s ambition is to connect these efforts under one big roof. It is less about reinventing the wheel, and more about putting Indian cacao bean more firmly on the global map. “That is really where Manam Chocolate began: with the belief that India didn’t need to borrow somebody else’s chocolate story. We could build our own,” says Muppala.

The bar with the farmer’s name on it

The brand now produces over 350 products across 50 categories. Perhaps the most special are Manam’s award-winning Farmers’ Series chocolate tablets. Each bar comes wrapped in a packaging that carries a QR code, allowing the customers to trace the cacao’s journey from farm to factory. More importantly, it acknowledges the farmer who has cultivated the cacao. “If you scan the QR code and enter the batch number, it’ll tell you exactly which farm the cacao in that bar came from, when it was harvested, when it reached the fermentery, and when it was processed,” says Muppala. “We want to remind ourselves and our children that Indian chocolate has a story—it comes from a tree and from the labour of farmers, not from a supermarket shelf or a fridge.”

Last year, Manam Chocolate opened its Delhi shop—a 3,200 sq ft space in Malaviya Nagar—and the VIPs who inaugurated the space were a group of farmers. Muppala recalls the moment when one of the farmers picked up a bar from a shelf and realised it had been made with cacao grown on his very own farm. “The farmers are an integral part of our story. In fact, they’re the core of it,” says Muppala. “For them, these chocolates reflect the pride of their land. Usually, the farmer is the invisible part of the chocolate story. You see the beautiful packaging, the chocolatier, the finished product but you don’t see the person who grew the cacao. For us, we wanted to reverse that.”

This moment of recognition and pride isn’t just symbolic; it captures what Muppala sees as a transformative shift in Indian chocolate-making. Next month, the brand opens its first beverage bar at Delhi’s DLF Promenade, and in October, another experiential space at Ireo Grand View in Gurugram. Muppala is optimistic about expanding but notes that craft chocolate in India is where speciality coffee was two decades ago. “With every other movement that happened elsewhere in the world, we’ve only had the chance to copy or catch up in India. But the fine-flavour cacao movement is still nascent globally—and we have a chance to lead. Perhaps we’ll be the ones to set global practices around cacao.”