Anuva Kakkar once sold cups of hot chocolate to commuters outside the DLF Phase-3 metro station in Gurugram.

The 24-year-old is now an entrepreneur behind Tiggle, an Agra-based D2C organic hot chocolate brand.

The drink is made of premium cocoa sourced from a 40-acre family-owned certified organic farm near Pollachi, Tamil Nadu.

There are three ‘premium’ varieties of hot chocolate powder — Light Hot Chocolate Mix, Dark Hot Chocolate Mix and Jaggery Hot Chocolate Mix.

Here’s how Anuva achieved this.

Born and raised in Agra, she grew up in an upper-middle-class household with a father, who is a small business owner and mother, a banker.

Upon completing her graduation in business administration in 2019 from Banasthali University, she worked at a startup in Gurugram.

It was while working there that the idea of starting Tiggle first came. “One day, while working in Gurugram, I began craving a cup of hot chocolate,” she says.

As a fresher starting her professional career, she would have to travel or order from a cafe and spend Rs 200 on a cup.

“Instead of figuring out how to budget for my hot chocolate cravings, I thought why not make it at home?”

The lack of quality hot chocolate mixes in the market got Anuva thinking about building something new and innovative in the hot beverage section.

She began researching and creating her own basic hot chocolate recipe using simple ingredients found in the market.

She recounts designing and printing a couple of pamphlets, making about 25 cups of hot chocolate, and selling them outside the DLF Phase-3 metro station.

Eventually, she partnered up with a kiosk inside the metro station sometime in January 2020. “Every morning, I would wake up at about 5 am, make a couple of litres of hot chocolate and take that to the kiosk owner who would sell it for the rest of the day,” she says.

In the evening, post-office hours, she would collect her earnings for the day and ask for the kiosk owner’s feedback.

On weekends, she would stand with the kiosk owner, sell the hot chocolate and take feedback from customers rolling in and out of the metro station.

The vision for Tiggle was not just obtaining premium quality cocoa, but also finding ways of positively impacting farmers growing them. They finally partnered with the one 40-acre family-owned organic farm in Pollachi, Tamil Nadu.

“The reason we partnered with this farm is because of their consistent cocoa quality, farm freshness, and the direct impact which we could create on the farmers,” she says. The whole process of growing cocoa on the farms includes handpicking the cocoa fruit, mulching, fermentation, harvesting, sun drying, and grinding.

“The farm we chose did the best work of ensuring that the cocoa grown is mould-free. The farm in Pollachi practices growing cocoa organically and is free of chemicals and pesticides,” she adds.

Recently the brand also launched its first organic jaggery-based hot chocolate mix.

Set to feature on Shark Tank India Season 3, Anuva says it is a dream come true.

“We wrote our biggest dreams on a dream wall last March. One was: ‘We’re on Shark Tank India Season 3.’ 6 months later… guess what happened?” she wrote on her LinkedIn post. “My legs were shaking, my palms were sweating and my mind was going back to that dream board again and again, thinking how insane it is to dream with your eyes wide open.”

.