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Why choose Bean to Bar Chocolate made in India?
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Monday, 19 April, 2021, 13 : 00 PM [IST]
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Our Bureau, Mumbai
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The year 2021 can be considered a tipping point for the Bean to Bar industry in India. The bean to bar chocolate market in India has witnessed unprecedented growth in the last 2-3 years and is worth about Rs 10 crore (Cocoatrait Research) in 2021.
India currently boasts of around 28 small, medium and large sized bean to bar chocolate makers all demonstrating healthy growth rates and growing at over 40 per cent year on year on an average. Cocoatrait forecasts that there would be over 40 branded bean to bar chocolate makers by 2022. Interestingly, Covid-19 has only had a temporary dampening effect on the category and there seems to be minimal impact on sales overall in the year 2020.
For the interested, many mass produced industrial chocolates are also made from bean to bar. However, not all. In fact several premium and luxury chocolate brands do not control their entire chocolate making process. They simply buy bulk industrially produced chocolate and melt them, mix certain ingredients and mould them into chocolate bars or other chocolate products. This can be a fairly simplistic process and a bean to bar chocolate maker has a lot on the plate to deal with.
Understanding of how flavours of cacao are impacted by genetic variety (genotype), climate, bean composition, soil type, age of cocoa tree, postharvest treatments of the beans such as fermentation and drying, processing such as roasting, refining, conching, tempering as well as storage and transportation make bean to bar chocolates a balanced mix of both a science and art. This is a very interesting subject for chocolate makers, the trade and consumers alike.
From the supply side, this rise of craft or artisanal Bean to Bar chocolate makers in India has been bought about by the availability of small scale equipment, access to knowledge/technology and availability of raw materials (cacao beans) locally. Consumer exposure towards fine foods and beverages like wine, speciality coffee, teas and beer attributed primarily to increased travel, rise in disposable income, decreased propensity to savings and access to information has driven demand noticeably over the last few years.
In India and even globally, there is a misconception about terms such as ‘craft’, ‘fine’ ‘artisanal’ or ‘small batch', in chocolate and in other food categories. Many chocolate brands available on Indian shelves have been imported and/or finished in India using bulk chocolate made industrially from the bulk variety of beans which are usually imported from bulk cacao producing countries like Africa. By alkalising cacao, mass market chocolate manufacturers are able to manipulate the flavour, acidity and colour.
This is why mass-market dark chocolate is usually intensely bitter with little flavour complexity and are overly dark in colour. The intense bitterness after alkalising is then offset by adding excessive sugar and also milk (in some cases) to make it more palatable to the masses consuming it as a replacement of traditional sweets! This bitterness becomes evident when you consume a 50 per cent dark chocolate where most of the balance 50 per cent is sugar and the chocolate still remains bitter.
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