Do you like chocolates or do you love chocolates? If chocolate tops your list of favourite foods, then it’s your year to rejoice. According to the Godrej Food Trends Report 2021, there is a surge for locally sourced, artisanal bean-to-bar chocolates in India.

But what are these bean-to-bar chocolates? The term refers to chocolate that is made from scratch by a single company in small batches, using a distinct source for cacao beans. The Indian bean-to-bar chocolate movement has evolved as new makers pursue their passion, creating premium brands and experimenting with flavours to cater to the sophisticated palate.

On World Chocolate Day, 2021, let’s look at some of the interesting chocolate brands from our country.

Soklet

Branding itself as a ‘tree-to-bar chocolate maker’, Soklet creates single-origin chocolates with cocoa sourced entirely from its own plantations. The brand grows its cacao as an intercrop along with coconut, nutmeg, pepper, and banana in the Anaimalai hills near the Indira Gandhi National Park in Tamil Nadu. According to Soklet, chocolate is only as good as its beans and real chocolate needs nothing more than cacao beans and sugar. Their chocolate range includes a selection of dark and milk chocolates, flavoured bars, drinking chocolate and chocolate spreads.

Kocoatrait

Kocoatrait is a luxury, single-origin bean-to-bar brand that boasts of ‘zero waste chocolate’. The Chennai-based brand’s chocolate offerings are completely free of plastic, paper, and wood pulp packaging. The 5 P’s of their priority model are people, planet, plants, performance and profits. Kocoatrait’s vegan chocolate bars include fun flavours such as coconut milk and cinnamon, red rose, masala chai, etc. The brand also operates an institute called Cocoashala and offers a three-day bean-to-bar chocolate-making programme.

Paul and Mike

Named after two Latin American fine cocoa farmers, the brand grows and ferments cocoa on its own farms in Kochi and Coimbatore. Headquartered in Kochi, its chocolate-making unit is in the same city, just a kilometre away from its cocoa farm. Paul and Mike target to become a carbon-positive brand by 2023. They also offer farm-to-bar tours where chocolate lovers can learn from their agronomists and chocolate-makers. The brand uses fine flavour cocoa beans, real fruits, nuts, spices and real floral distillates. Their dark chocolate vegan bar with Sichuan pepper and orange haswowed judges and confectionery enthusiasts worldwide.

Chitram Chocolates

This Coimbatore brand makes its chocolates with handpicked cacao from Kerala. Chitram Chocolates uses alternatives to white sugar in their chocolates such as coconut sugar, jaggery, palm sugar, and unprocessed cane sugar. The chocolates are infused with popular Indian flavours such as ragi and coconut, rose and saffron, and Mango lassi.

Naviluna Artisan Chocolate

Previously known as ‘Earth Loaf’, Naviluna Artisan Chocolate uses organically certified Indian cacao beans. The Mysore brand does not roast the beans and its chocolates are entirely handcrafted. Pepper, lime, orange, coffee and pineapple were some of the ingredients in the chocolate bars of Naviluna’s ‘Winter 2020 collection’. The brand runs various subscription plans for its regular customers and supplies its chocolate bars for sale at many cafés and boutiques across the country.

Do you know about any more local bean-to-bar Indian chocolate brands? Tell us in the comments.