“India's chocolate industry was dominated by compounds — the palm-oil-and-cocoa-powder products that Cadbury and Amul sold in purple and gold wrappers and that constituted ninety-three percent of the market. The remaining seven percent was "real" chocolate — cocoa butter, single-origin, craft production — and the remaining seven percent was where Madhav lived, professionally and spiritually. He believed, with the conviction of a man who had tasted a properly made seventy-percent dark bar from Idukki beans and whose life had divided into before and after that tasting, that Indian cocoa could produce world-class chocolate. The world did not yet agree. The world was eating compound and calling it chocolate and Madhav was driving ghat roads trying to change the world's mind one estate at a time.”
© 2026 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.