(If you don't know what I mean by bean to bar and craft chocolate, you can scroll down to the very end where I give some descriptions.)
Bean to bar chocolates are pretty new in India, and I believe there were only two brands on the market when I came in 2016. It remained slow to pick up, and it seemed like there would be a new brand every year or two up until the pandemic. Since then the scene has really flourished, with new brands popping up left and right, showcasing Indian beans as well as Indian ingredients in the flavors.
Overall I’m very happy with the Indian chocolate scene. I find it comparable quality wise to high end chocolates I’ve had from around the world, and the prices in India are lower than anywhere else, often significantly. There are enough brands around that I have a hard time keeping up, and most major cities and many smaller ones even have bean to bar cafes. If there’s one thing I’d like to see, it’s more creative and unusual flavors. (Marketing idea: do a line of bars with fun flavors by India’s top chefs.)
I also would like to see more brands showcasing different single origins. With that said, it's very cool that a lot of the brands here have their own cacao plantations or work directly with farmers and do farm visits. This is understandably less common with European or American craft chocolate brands. For me it's fun getting chocolate from a cacao growing country like India where it feels more personal, and I think that personal touch comes across in more distinctive flavors as well when brands get their beans from smaller farms.
Chocolate & Me
I don't have any expertise to be rating chocolate. With that said, I’ve always enjoyed dark chocolate and in recent years have taken a more serious interest in the topic. I try local brands wherever I go and I took a tree to bar chocolate making course on a cacao plantation with Ketaki Churi, who is the co-founder of the Indian Cacao & Craft Chocolate Festival. (I've also read The True History of Chocolate by Sophie and Michael D. Coe. That was awesome.) I’ve contemplated becoming a certified chocolate taster, just for fun, but it’s too expensive for me to do right now. I won’t claim to really know anything, but I know more than the average person and I have tried a lot of craft chocolates around the world and in India to the point where I can make a list of favorites.
To give some context for my tastes, I prefer bars that are in the 70-80% range, I love trying plain single origin bars to appreciate the tastes, and I am a novelty seeker and want unusual flavors for the inclusion/infusion bars. My recommendations are based on my own taste, but most of the brands mentioned should have something for everyone, so take a look at their websites. Bars below 70% risk becoming too sweet for me, but bars in the 60s can be fine, especially if they have inclusions. I’ll try bars in the 50s if they have interesting flavors, but those really are too sweet. Below that I won’t even bother unless the flavors are very very wacky, same with milk bars, and I almost never try white bars. Bars in the high 70s and low to mid 80s can often be enjoyable if made well, but it is rarely the optimal cocoa/sugar balance. If I buy a bar in the 80s or 90s, it is mostly out of an academic curiosity and a lack of other bars that interest me from the brand. But anyway, you can like what you like, don’t worry about me judging you, even though anyone who knows me knows that I will judge you.
(It would be beneath a classy blog such as this to make a "I like my chocolate like I like my women joke," but "dark and weird" is actually fairly accurate, though I can't say "in the 70s" applies well to both of the matters at hand. Meanwhile, what a coincidence, Indians on average seem to prefer chocolates with a milky-wheatish complexion and a mild, unassertive flavor.)
About the Guide
I am only mentioning brands that have websites you can order from (most ship nationwide but some only ship to major cities). There are some very small brands that are only available locally in some places, those will be mentioned only in the guides for those particular places. Some of the brands I’m mentioning are only or mostly only available on their websites. Some can be found easily in stores, but I prefer buying from websites than from stores because the bars are usually fresher and you get a better selection of flavors. Most of these brands offer free shipping when you buy a certain amount and many give discounts as well.
I’m only including bean to bar chocolates here. I apologize to the non bean to bar chocolate makers in India, some of whom are very good and will be included in my city guides for relevant places. If you’re confused what separates bean to bar chocolates from other bars, check out the appendix at the bottom.
Every brand on here uses good ingredients. Obviously no oils. Real ingredients for the inclusions and generally no added “natural flavors,” which as a life rule I avoid and they aren't as natural as they sound, but some brands included here have a few bars with natural flavors (obviously no “artificial flavors” or colors either). I have no issue with lecithins so won’t be mentioning them. Some of these bars have lecithins and some don’t, if you care you can just look up the ingredients yourself. I also don’t mention anything about the bars being organic or fair trade or sustainable or anything like that, but that is a selling point that many of these brands have. Check their websites for more info.
I don’t eat artificial sweeteners, so every bar I mention either has sugar or some alternative but real sweetener like jaggery, coconut sugar, dates, etc. Some of these brands may offer artificial sweetener bars as well though, if you're looking for that (off the top of my head I think only Manam does), and most of these brands offer some 100% and other high percentage bars, so if by off chance any diabetics have read this far then you'll have some options.
Several of the brands and bars I’m recommending have won international awards. I’m not going to mention any, and I don’t really pay attention to that stuff, but good for them. There are plenty of BS food awards out there that you should ignore, but the ones I see on craft chocolate bars are actually respectable (I usually see the International Chocolate Awards or the Academy of Chocolate). If a brand wins it should mean they meet some baseline quality level, but a brand without awards may just be too small to afford entering, and brands aren’t going to enter all of their bars as you have to pay per bar, and bars that fall short of winning can still be great. Or maybe I just have bad taste and don’t know anything. Don’t think too much about it. The real award is being included on this list, as far as we are concerned over here.
I’m mostly only talking about the chocolate themselves, but many of these brands have cool packaging.
All of these brands source their beans from South India (Andhra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, or Kerala, the four primary states where cacao grows in India), and a few get international beans as well for some of their bars. I’ve heard of beans growing in Northeast India but haven’t seen any bars with beans from there yet. If you know of any, let me know!
When I mention the prices, I’m just looking at the prices and not the sizes for the most part. The brands selling ~50g bars are generally cheaper than the ones selling ~70g bars, but the size is sort of meaningless to me since 50g is more than enough chocolate for me. So when I discuss the relative costs of the bars, I’m just comparing it to a normal sized bar and not calculating the cost per gram. The exceptions are when discussing brands that offer mini tasting sized bars. Also, if I list prices, they’re accurate from when I wrote this in July 2023, but there’s a lot of chocolate inflation so I’m sorry if/when they cease to be accurate.
There are a handful of good looking brands that I’ve wanted to try and haven’t gotten around to because they don’t accept my American credit card! I could ask my wife to buy them for me, but that would spoil the surprise, and the unexpected boxes of chocolates that come every month are the only reason she hasn’t left me yet. But anyway, I hope to update this with more brands in the future. Apologies to all I missed, there are too many and I can’t keep up, but I hope to update this with several more brands within the next year.
I’m going to list these alphabetically because they’re all very good and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by ranking them last when really most of them are tied. However, I’ll say my very favorites are Naviluna and Subko, though they are also the most expensive. For all, I give honest assessments of what different brands excel at. Some are better for tasting different chocolate origins, some are better for more creative flavors, and some are more all-rounders and consistently good even if they don’t stand out in a particular area. Some are pretty big brands that are widely available and operate on a large scale, some are pretty tiny and very small batch, but I think most of these brands fall somewhere in the middle. Of course, just being a good quality bean to bar brand is enough to make them all stand out in the overall chocolate marketplace, and I recommend all of these.
Also, some brands I have more to say about than others, mainly because I tried them more recently or there's a particular bar or two that I felt like singling out. Some of these brands I’ve had regularly 5+ years ago but haven’t tried recently because I make an effort to try the new brands and can only buy and eat so much chocolate. I think all of these brands I've tried at least four different bars from, and all are ones I look forward to buying again.
The Guide
Table of contents:
Bon Fiction
Chitram
Darkins
La Folie
Manam Chocolate
Mason & Co
Naviluna
Oona
Paul and Mike
Soklet
Subko
The Whole Truth
Bon Fiction
Bon Fiction is an Andhra based company where they have their own cacao plantation and also source from nearby plantations in the Godavari region. This might be the cheapest of the bean to bar brands, with most of the bars being only 225 rupees, but the quality is still great, with a memorably fruity cacao flavor and good quality, if not especially novel, inclusions for the flavored bars. They’re also fairly easy to find, I’ve seen them at Crossword stores (though the dates weren’t always very fresh) and some random grocery stores here and there. I ordered online and they came to Mumbai in two days, with free shipping over 750inr as well as some discounts, though I was disappointed a few bars were 4-6 months old. They were fine though. They don’t have a range of single origins, but they have dark bars in a range of percentages that should please everyone (99, 91, 82, 73, & 64), while inclusion bars tend to be on the sweeter side (mostly in the 50s, a few in the 60s, and unfortunately none in the 70s). The 73% and the 82% plain bars were both great with very fruity flavors, and the 82% is less bitter than expected, one of the better 80+ bars I’ve had recently. Of the flavored bars, I tried all but one of the 64% bars (the orange cinnamon was sadly sold out) and they were all delicious. The mint bar had a bold mint flavor, though I would have liked some more crunch and salt in the peanut sea salt bar and would have preferred the cranberry chili bar to be a little darker. They were very good though. I also liked the 55% bars I tried, even though they are on the sweeter side to me. The mango chili stood out, with the freeze dried mango boosting the fruitiness and the chili balancing the sweetness well. I wanted a stronger coffee flavor from the coffee bar, but it was still good, and the coconut milk bar was enjoyable as someone who likes coconut. Overall I felt the quality of everything was very good with the darker bars being particularly great.
Chitram
Chitram is based in Coimbatore, where they also have a cafe called Infusions. Some articles say they source cacao from different farms across South India, though they don’t showcase single origins. I got my bars shipped to Mumbai. They offer free shipping above 1000 inr, and I got four bars at 250 inr each, which makes this brand on the cheaper side. (Free advice to Chitram and some other brands on here: price them at 249 each and then people like me will have to buy five bars to get free shipping! Or maybe that will just piss people off and make them less likely to buy, I don’t know.) One thing I really like about Chitram is that their flavored bars lean more heavily into Indian ingredients and traditional recipes than probably any other brand. Very cool packaging too. If I directed an ad for them I would set it at a Carnatic music concert. Unfortunately, the plain 76% bar with coconut sugar didn’t work for me, which is unusual. I found the chocolate quality to be a little too harsh, tannic, and astringent. I’d be curious to try it again to see if it was just a seasonal or batch variation, and I will try the 70% palm sugar bar next time which might be better for this bean quality. (The 70% is an award winner, so I’d expect the quality to be good, though keep in mind the awards are given to specific batches and part of the fun of small brands like this is the batch to batch variation…at least that’s part of the fun for me.) I loved the flavored bars though. I got a local fruit bar with mango, jackfruit, and banana as well as a bar with lemon, ginger, lemongrass, green tea, and tulsi. I found both bars to be interesting and delicious. I’m not sure of the percentages, though they tasted on the darker side. The most exciting bar for me was the masala chaas white chocolate with no added sugar. I have never liked white chocolate very much, finding it too blandly sweet, but it turns out that if you don’t actually sweeten it at all it still tastes mildly sweet from the milk powder and ultimately quite good. This was a revelation. I still prefer chocolate chocolate, but this was nonetheless an exciting discovery, and I spent considerable time searching for chocolate brands around the world and couldn’t find a single other unsweetened white chocolate (this is tough to search for because whenever you search for something that is sugar free you mostly get bars with artificial sweeteners). Putting the novelty of unsweetened white chocolate aside, the chaas bar was great, with yogurt powder, ginger, green chili, hing, and salt. I think the flavors could have been amped up more to make it more chaaslike, but I still really liked it. Other than those bars, there unfortunately weren’t any I wanted to try as they all were on the sweet/milky side for my taste, but they have a handful of other interesting sounding flavors for those who like milk or white chocolate, including rose sandalwood white chocolate, moringa lemon white chocolate, and mango lassi milk chocolate. According to their website you can special order cacao nib podi, pesto, and achaar. I don’t know how any of that sounds but I’d like to try!
Darkins
Darkins is based in Delhi and they source beans from Andhra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. They offer free shipping nationwide when you spend over 1000inr, and most bars are 250 while single origins are 330. Despite the three single origins, they unfortunately (at least to me) only offer the different beans at very different percentages (80, 70, and 55), which means you can’t do a tasting where you get a good sense of how the beans differ the way you could if all bars were in the 70s. Nonetheless, the quality of everything was very good, though I wasn’t crazy about the 80% Karnataka bar. I tried a few inclusion bars, all good, but the pièce de résistance was the paan bar which was 10/10. It had cherry, paan leaves, fennel, cardamon, and natural rose extract. Maybe the best flavored chocolate bar in India. A must try. I wish they had more creative flavors that were on the darker side. I’d love to try the pineapple and paprika bar but I know it’d be too sweet for me. The darker flavors are a bit more basic (almond, blueberry, cranberry chili), nothing groundbreaking, but that’s okay. They have a range of dragees too, including podi chocolate covered peanuts which I want to try. I bought the dragees with orange jelly in the center, and the flavor was good though I didn't care for the jelly texture. They also have some nut spreads.
La Folie
La Folie is based in Mumbai, where they’ve long been a leader in desserts and used to have a nice cafe in Bandra, and more recently they’ve started making bean to bar chocolates. They still have a cafe in Fort, now focused on chocolate, and their factory is in Mahalaxmi, where they used to have a cafe but I think it is no longer open for visits. Their cacao is a mix of Indian (the website notes Kerala on a few bars) and international (I’d love to know what sort of flavors they get from international cacao that they aren’t getting from India, or if there’s another reason they aren’t going exclusively with Indian beans). Their chocolate is pretty widely available in stores, at least in Mumbai. I’ve never bought online but they ship to most major cities. Bars range from 330-380inr. They have a lot of other things (dragees, ganaches, bon bons, pastries, etc) but I’ve mostly only tried the bars as I generally find those other things to be too sweet. I haven’t tried their bars in a few years and I should give them another go as I always found the quality to be very good. I generally love bars with salt in them and their smoked pink salt bar is a wonderful twist to that. The other flavored bar I loved was the green mango and naga chili. There’s a really good 85% “Granola” bar which basically studs the bar with granola, a great idea that I’m surprised I don’t see more often as it balances the dark bar really well. The Silk Route bar sounds interesting, with rose, hibiscus, cardamom, pepper, and pistachio, I hope to try that soon. Many of the other flavored bars were too sweet for me but there’s a good amount of options here with whatever you like.
Manam Chocolate
Manam Chocolate is based in Hyderabad where they have an awesome factory/cafe which ranks among the nicest chocolate cafes I’ve ever been to. I went I think four times, and I will write about it in detail in my Hyderabad blog post, while here I’ll just focus on the stuff you can order online (free shipping over 1500). They have an assortment of cacao origins, both Indian and international, but I’d say their specialty is the Andhra beans (both single origin and single farm), sourced from the West Godavari region where they have their very fancy looking fermentery. Bars range from 375-500. In store they had smaller, cheaper bars, but I don’t see those on the website. They have an overwhelming amount of options, thankfully the website is easy to navigate. I mostly went with the Indian origin dark bars available in smaller sizes in the store. They were all very good, and my favorite was the Malabar bar. I really want to try their creative fermentation bars, which they introduced when I came on my last visit. I sampled them in the store but it wasn’t enough to get a feel for the flavors, and at that point I had spent so much on chocolate I didn’t want to buy large pricey bars (they had no small ones). I’ll definitely get those next time, though. For all of the origin options they offer, they surprisingly don’t have a ton of inclusion bars, and all of the ones they do have are on the sweeter side. They have a billion other things (cookies, dragees, spreads, bars, bon bons, nibs, etc). I tried a lot in store and it was all good quality. The snacking nibs in particular stood out, as did the curry leaf cookies. They do add “natural vanilla flavor” to many of the sweeter bars and many of their other products, but the dark bars meet my purity standards.
Mason & Co
Mason & Co is one of India’s earliest bean to bar brands, founded in 2014 and based in Auroville where they offer tours of the factory. Regrettably I went to Auroville during the pandemic so was unable to visit the factory, though I did visit their excellent associated cafe Bread & Chocolate. Their website says beans come from across South India, though no single origins are offered. They’re found easily at nice grocery stores across India, in addition to online. I bought Mason & Co a lot back in the day when they were one of two good brands available, but I haven’t tried them in a few years so I can’t speak to the specifics. Still, I always felt the quality was high, both in the chocolate and the inclusions. Some interesting inclusions include the sourdough and sea salt and the rosemary and sea salt. They also have coffee bars with coffee blended with cacao butter, kind of like a chocolate bar texture wise but with coffee flavor instead of chocolate flavor. Those are interesting. I recall not liking the black coffee one but loving the latte one, which is surprising since I’m not a milk chocolate fan. They have some spreads and other products as well.
Naviluna
Naviluna is the other Indian O.G. bean to bar brand, founded in 2014 and originally called Earth Loaf. They are based in Mysore, where I visited their very humble village setup in 2021, though they’ve since moved to a nice heritage building where they’ve set up a small cafe that I look forward to visiting one day. They source beans from across South India and they currently have two single origins, though I recall them having four in the past. They can be found here and there at nice grocery stores. 440 per bar is a lot but it’s worth the splurge. Naviluna might be my favorite brand on this list, though some of that comes from sentimental value from buying them over the years. I think they were the first brand where I ever bought multiple single origins and did a tasting of three different beans, probably around six years back, and this was eye opening for understanding how different beans can taste so different. I was so naive and innocent back then. They have excellent single origins and really interesting flavors that incorporate local ingredients in unique ways. There’s one with three different banana varieties processed three different ways, one with long pepper, gondhoraj limes, and candied orange, and one with bamboo shoots, lemongrass, and cigar infused date syrup. I highly recommend it all! My wife buys their baking chocolate, oddly it's cheaper than most of the other brands’ baking chocolates despite Naviluna generally being more expensive.
Oona
Oona is a very small brand based somewhere in the mountains, with a few different South Indian cacao origins to try. They used to be called Cochoa before rebranding because they decided to go vegan and organic and sustainable and whatnot and thought a new avatar would better serve their new vision. Compared to some other brands on here, it took longer to ship to Mumbai (IIRC it was around 1 to 1.5 weeks, and you get free shipping when spending over 1000 inr), so keep that in mind when ordering. It is very much worth the wait, though. Bars are between 295 and 325 inr.
The selection is small. When I ordered, they had two 70% single origins, Idukki and Anamalai, with a third that was unavailable. Both were terrific, and the commitment to small batches really comes out in the flavors, which are more nuanced and complex than most brands. Great for a chocolate tasting session. We ate them over a week and one was a clear favorite the first few days, and then as the days went on the other one snuck up on us and may have emerged victorious. Try both. They had one inclusion bar, a Kerala inspired 55% with shredded coconut and black pepper, which was also great, and they have some 100% tablets which are great for making chocolate beverages.
Paul and Mike
Paul and Mike is based in Kochi where they have their own farm and factory where they offer public tours (I’ve yet to go). They also have a farm in Coimbatore and source from other farms in South India. In Mumbai’s Kemps Corner they have a tiny, tiny cafe/shop where they sell their products (which you can sample) and have a small selection of drinks and desserts. This is probably the most widely available brand I’ve seen on the list (I even bought some of their bars in Leh and Srinagar), but I like buying online (free shipping above 750inr) because the selection is greater and the bars are fresher, and they also usually throw in some small sample things to try. Most bars are 250inr but some push above 300, and they have sample boxes where you can try a good range of small bars at a low price (though as someone who only likes dark bars these box sets where you can’t choose aren’t ideal). Paul and Mike has good plain dark bars at different percentages, though no single origins. Where they really shine, though, are in the inclusion bars, and they have the most extensive array of flavors of any bean to bar brand in India, with a good range of normal flavors and more weird ones. My favorite flavor is maybe the sichuan pepper and orange peel (they I should note this isn’t for everyone and it was very divisive at a chocolate tasting). Some of my other favorites include a turmeric, pepper, and ginger infused bar, and bars they did in collaboration with Two Brothers farms, one with jaggery and the other with peanut chikki. They have some bars showcasing local fruits, they’re mostly too sweet for me but I like the 64% jamun bar and another with cape gooseberry. The hazelnut bar is delicious, containing a generous amount of hazelnut throughout. One interesting bar is the one with Brunost cheese from Eleftheria, which is an amazing cheese, though the bar was too sweet for me. All of their flavors are real ingredients except for some of the alcohol bars, though the gin bar has real flavors with juniper oil and candied ginger (I wish they went in that direction with the other alcohol bars, finding ways to semi-replicate the flavor without adding "flavor"). I don't drink alcohol so I'm not sure how ginny it is, but I enjoyed the spicy, herbal, and citrusy flavors of the bar. They also make or have co-branded cookies, dragees, barks, and other things like that. I mostly haven’t tried these, but the chocolate covered capers are 10/10, a must try, among the best things I’ve ever eaten. Highly, highly recommended! Unfortunately I found the chocolate covered coffee beans to be way too sweet.
Soklet
Soklet is based in Pollachi, not far from Annamalai foothills where they have a plantation. It’s also near Coimbatore, where they deliver what look to be high quality baked goods. I’ve seen the chocolates in stores on occasion but it’s not that common, and they offer free shipping when you spend over 1000inr. Bars are 200 inr each, which makes them the cheapest on this list per bar, though not necessarily per gram as they are smaller bars at 50g each. Personally I like getting these smaller sizes at a lower cost. They also sell some cookies, spreads, and a few other products but I haven’t tried any.
They have plain bars at a range of percentages and a small selection of inclusion bars, and it’s all really good quality. One fun bar is the hibiscus and pumpkin seed. The best flavor was black garlic, but that’s been discontinued. Bring back the black garlic! I really liked everything I tried though.
One really interesting bar they have is an 80% milk bar with no sugar, so it’s just cacao and milk. When you put it in your mouth it feels very dark, like a 100% bar, but as it melts the natural sugar of the milk kicks in. I’m surprised this isn’t more of a thing! I searched far and wide and only found one other brand anywhere in the world doing it (as usual the issue for searching here is that searches for sugar free chocolate just bring you results with artificial sweeteners), though the sugarfree white chocolate by Chitram that I mentioned earlier is conceptually similar. I don’t mind having small amounts of sugar in my chocolates, but this is a great idea for those who have to drastically limit their sugar for whatever reason (unless there’s some catch here, I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, this is not medical advice). I’d be interested in seeing more experimentation here. What about one that is 30% milk, or 10% sugar and 15% milk, or something like that and with some inclusions added, or with coconut or some other alternative milk? I assume this is all possible to do and I’m really surprised it isn’t done more. I always say I don’t like milk chocolates, but this made me realize that the issue isn’t the milk but the sugar levels that generally go with milk chocolates. Adding milk still wouldn’t be ideal for appreciating the flavor of the beans, but I think there’s untapped potential here for not just reducing sugar levels but also possibly enhancing certain flavors.
Subko
Subko is the Mumbai based high end mini chain of cafes specializing in fancy coffee and baked goods, arguably the best in India. However, everybody knows that coffee is for sad caffeine addicted pretentious hipsters, and baked goods are for boring carb addicted plebes, and that chocolate is the real gourmand bean of choice. Subko has responded to this market segment by expanding to making chocolates, and the result is expectedly excellent. They have their great chocolate factory and cafe in Colaba (with fun exclusive chocolate food and drink offerings) in addition to other cafes scattered around Mumbai and a few others in other parts of the country, though their Hyderabad cafe is the only other one that focuses on chocolate. I’m not sure how big of a chocolate selection the other cafes have, but you can order online I think nationwide. Most bars are 395 inr but they have various sizes, if you want to get a bunch of single origins for a tasting you can get small 18g bars for 145 inr. Expensive on a per gram basis but a great way to try a lot without spending a ton. Cacao beans come from around South India, and the brand really pushes their different single origin bars. The website currently shows five single origins, though a few are out of stock. I had gone to the cafe shortly after they opened and picked up four single origins. They were all great and distinctive, and this is maybe the most “chocolate nerd” brand on the market, with information on the packaging about the farms, varietals, roast levels, fermentation, altitude, and tasting notes. Some other brands have some of this info but none share quite the full spectrum. I wouldn’t necessarily want every brand to do it, but I think it’s cool. I’d say this is the best brand out there right now to do a chocolate tasting of different origins, at least when enough are in stock. There are some inclusion bars (ranging from 395 to 445 inr) with normal flavors like sea salt or coffee, and then there are some “experimental bars” inspired by some of Subko’s popular baked goods: the walnut chocolate chip cookie bar and the cold brew chocolate tart bar. I sampled them at the cafe and remember liking them but at 695 inr per bar I can’t see myself buying them. Once at one of their cafes I saw an experimental fermentation bar that I regret not buying because now I don’t see it. More exciting than the inclusion bars, in my opinion, are the various other products they have. There are podi infused milk chocolate covered almonds and dark chocolate covered espresso beans. There are cubes, which are like large cube shaped bonbons, with great fillings. Those aren’t cheap but I got a box of four and it was a nice treat. And then there are fancy versions of candy bars, with different ones inspired by Twix, Reese’s, and Snickers. I haven’t tried these yet.
The Whole Truth
The Whole Truth is sort of an outlier on this list, a health food brand first and foremost that also makes bean to bar chocolate (with beans from Kerala) with no added sugar and instead has ground dates as a sweetener. This theoretically makes it a little healthier, though Paul and Mike disputed this in a mythbuster I think clearly targeted at Whole Truth, saying “if some irresponsible marketer tries to sell dates sweetened chocolate to you claiming it has no added sugar, tell them you would go for whole dates instead!” (They later introduced their own date sweetened bars, which I found kind of funny.) I’m staying out of India’s chocolate wars and won’t be adjudicating the health claims here, but anyway I like Whole Truth’s chocolate and other products, which are pretty widely available in shops in India, at least in Mumbai, and I buy their stuff regularly. I mostly buy the muesli, peanut butter, and energy bars (most often on Swiggy, where they are frequently discounted), which are relevant because they all have variants that contain their chocolate, but I also pick up the bars here and there when I see them. I see a lot of movies, sometimes 3-4 in a day, and since I don’t drink caffeinated beverages I find chocolate bars are good to give me a boost on my busy movie days, and Whole Truth is my go to for taking with me to movies (I often eat the chocolate with sourdough bread, what I call the Almodovar sandwich, if you know you know…), partly because it feels slightly more wholesome than other bars and partly because it’s relatively inexpensive. Or at least it used to be inexpensive, websites are showing 349 inr but I swear I used to pay 199 or 219 or something like that. That’s a massive increase! There’s been a lot of chocolate inflation lately but none of the other brands have raised their prices so much. Their other products don’t seem to have increased their prices. Anyway, I guess this is no longer my go to brand to buy on a whim and take to the movies, but nonetheless I like the chocolate! The date sweetened chocolate is not quite the same, I don't think it melts in my mouth quite as smoothly, and I think they taste slightly less sweet as a result of the dates, but I don’t really mind any of that. Of the darkest bars (around 70%) there’s a plain bar and a sea salt bar, both of which I really like, and one with orange oil which wasn’t my thing. They have some nut bars that are sweeter percentage wise than I typically like, but I actually really like these, I think partly because the dates make it less sweet but also because they use more nuts than the typical bar. The hazelnut bar is 47% cacao and 15% hazelnut, and the almond raisin bar is 47% cacao, 9% almond, and 6% raisin (the rest dates). There’s a small, inexpensive milk chocolate bar with almonds which is 31% cacao, 25% almond, and 20% milk, I bought it on a whim and surprisingly quite liked it. As I mentioned I mostly buy their muesli, peanut butter, and energy bars, all really good. The chocolate peanut butter is awesome. They have a chocolate hazelnut healthy-nutella type of spread too, a bit sweet for me, but good. The energy bars are around 16% cacao with the rest being about an even mix of dates and nuts. These are my other go-to movie theater snacks. Note that the energy bars are different from the protein bars, which have whey protein which I don’t eat, and they also sell protein powder. Not my thing, but I suspect these are some of the better quality and reasonably priced ones on the market, at least for people who care about “clean” ingredients.
Appendix
Is Chocolate Healthy?
I'm pretty sure that in all of my food posts I mention trying to eat healthy while also indulging in local foods, and I occasionally refer to things as not being worth the calories and whatnot. I definitely mention not liking sweets very much and not finding them worth eating most of the time. So I feel the need to caveat that I don't think chocolate is unhealthy. I'm not saying it's "healthy" either, and I don’t want to push any pseudoscience superfood claims, but cacao has a fair amount of nutrients and chocolate is far from junk food if you eat the right stuff. It should be perfectly fine to eat for most people within reason, never mind that reason is in short supply.
Everybody’s idea of what is or isn’t healthy is different so I don’t want to make any absolute statements, but the only “bad” thing in good quality chocolate is sugar, and the sugar content of dark chocolates is small enough that I’d actually call it negligible, and it’s arguably balanced by good fat, protein, fiber, and minerals. I'm not a calorie counter, but in any case I find it difficult to eat too much.
If I have a 70g sized 70% bar, and if I eat 20% of the bar in a given day (more than I would normally eat!), that’s only around 4g of sugar per day, which is quite small, probably less than the amount of sugar that’s in a slathering of ketchup or whatever. Even if you like much sweeter chocolate than I do, we’re still at much smaller sugar levels than most sweets, though it’s probably easier to “overeat” a lower cacao content bar. Keep in mind a can of coke is 39g of sugar, my wife’s favorite Starbucks iced lemon loaf is also 39g for a slice, most desserts aren’t much better, and ice cream, which has relatively low sugar levels for dessert, usually comes in around the mid-teens for a single scoop (depending on the brand, flavor, and scoop size).
Beyond the sugar, there’s nothing bad in good quality chocolate, no added oils or refined flours or anything that other desserts are likely to contain. I don't see any reason to avoid it other than the caffeine and theobromine content, which sometimes makes me kind of jittery and distracted if I have too much.
(If you are the kind of person who would eat multiple full bars of chocolate in one go, then ignore this whole section, it doesn’t apply to you, but also you should seek help I think.)
About Bean To Bar / Craft Chocolate (or whatever you want to call it)
A very brief description of "bean to bar" is that it refers to chocolates where the makers start with the cacao beans which they roast and process themselves, whereas most chocolates start with mass produced paste.
Bean to bar brands are generally considered to be "craft chocolate," or maybe "artisanal" or "specialty" chocolate or something like that. None of these terms have any technical or legal meanings and anyone can slap them on a label ("artisanal" is probably the most overused) so take them with a grain of salt, but theoretically they refer to higher quality chocolate where everything is done in small batches and more care is put into every step. This can begin at the level of farming and overseeing the fermentation, but it often starts with selecting the beans and roasting them. Craft chocolate also commonly emphasizes ethical, sustainable sourcing that pays fair wages to farmers while commercial chocolate often gets accused of using slave labor (I don't know what to make of these claims, I don't eat that stuff anyway, do your own research if you care).
I feel it's possible to be craft chocolate without being bean-to-bar and vice versa, but let's not concern ourselves with that now, and usually they are the same.
I won't say craft chocolate will taste better than "commercial chocolate" (for lack of a better term) because that's subjective, but it should have more complex flavors with less bitterness, and unlike commercial chocolates it won't rely on lots of sugar and chemical flavorings to taste good. Inclusions in craft chocolates should be higher quality, with only real ingredients rather than added aromas. There may also be more variability in taste and texture from batch to batch, which to some may be a negative but for me is a positive.
The best way to know what category a brand belongs to is to look it up and read about its practices, but labels can tell you a lot. Bean to bar chocolates usually list the first ingredient as cacao, cacao nibs, or cacao beans. Commercial chocolate will likely list cocoa mass or cocoa liquor first. (Note that if it's a sweeter bar the cacao/cocoa might not be the first ingredient. Also I have seen some actual bean-to-bar chocolate in Thailand list cocoa mass, so I don't know, maybe different countries have different terminologies and things get lost in translation.) The ingredient lists on craft chocolates are very small, often with just cacao and sugar on a plain bar (maybe some lecithin too), while commercial chocolates will usually have more additives.
Most countries have three broad tiers of chocolate bars:
1. Cheap crap bars (with lots of additives like oils and chemical flavors)
2. Mediocre but better quality mid-priced bars (usually no added oils, but they're still mass produced and often have chemical flavors and some other additives)
3. Expensive craft chocolate bars
Of course plenty of bars in lower categories try to pass themselves off as bars in higher categories, but it's not hard to figure these things out. There are arguably in-between categories. For purposes of this discussion, I'll refer to the first category as junk chocolate, the second category as mid-range chocolate, and the third category as craft chocolate.
I've only bought craft chocolate in the past three years but I think the higher end of mid-range chocolate is generally pretty good if not special. I don't want to act too snooty about it, and such chocolates might even have some advantages. My impression is that good pastry chefs like high-end mid-range chocolate not just because of cost but also because of consistency and reliability.
There's cost and quality variability in all categories but I'd say that in the United States craft chocolate costs around three times as much as mid-range chocolates. I don't bemoan someone buying a pretty decent $3 bar at Trader Joe's over a world class $10 craft chocolate bar.
India is a different story, though. It has all three categories but there's not really a cost difference between the mid-range and the craft chocolate, and sometimes the craft chocolate is even cheaper. The mid-range chocolate is often imported and I think a ripoff (the prices are much higher than what they would cost in its country of origin), while the craft chocolate is a great arbitrage opportunity.
People can obviously buy what they want, but I'm here to recommend that buyers of overpriced imported mid-range chocolate switch to similarly priced local craft chocolate.
I understand that the homegrown chocolate scene is very new in India and it will take time for the local brands to gain a foothold and displace the big legacy brands in the imagination of the public that thinks imported is better. I could make fun of that "Oh nothing beats Belgian chocolate!" attitude (never mind that cacao doesn't grow in Belgium), but it should be noted that imported chocolate probably was a lot better until the mid-2010s. (I've seen people contort their faces in fear and confusion when I suggested they try some of the Indian brands instead of Lindt.) I also understand, despite not actually understanding, that there's some weird culture of gifting mediocre things from Duty Free. And I understand that few consumers are connoisseurs and that's okay. But hopefully I can move the needle a little bit by nudging people towards what I consider to be better quality chocolate.
I do wonder, though, if despite being better quality from my perspective, the local craft chocolates aren't matching up to whatever people want taste or texture wise from the imported commercial bars. I'm curious about this, so if you feel that way please reach out to me and let me know your thoughts!
In general, I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts on bars they tried. I hope I can introduce people to some new chocolates that they love.
And as a special treat for anyone who made it this far, here's India's greatest fictional chocolate maker. Unfortunately the movie isn't as good as the teaser, nor does it have anything to do with chocolate.
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