For Karthikeyan Palanisamy and Harish Manoj Kumar, brothers-in-law from Coimbatore, the idea to launch a homegrown craft chocolate brand was born one evening in 2015 over a couple of drinks.

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While Karthikeyan managed the family textile business, Harish tended to his ancestral farm in Anamalai in central Kerala, a region known for its pleasant weather and favourable topology.

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So, on that fateful evening in 2015, when Harish — who was seeing good results with the cacao plantation at the farm — suggested that he wanted to start an export arm, Karthikeyan was intrigued.

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In the months that followed, Soklet was born in Karthikeyan and Harish’s garage.

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From here, the artisanal chocolate brand exports products close to 24 tonnes every year to countries across the globe, including the US, Europe, New Zealand, the Middle East and Japan, among others.

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Following the idea of starting a brand, they began experimenting with recipes off the internet in their garage.

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“But we made mistakes each time,” says Karthikeyan, adding that the first was when he tried washing the cacao beans, as he thought they seemed “dirty”. “Never do this. I ended up with a gooey mess.”

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In addition to this, there were other factors to watch out for, such as the roasting temperature, the ratio while grinding, etc.

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One month and many experiments later, Soklet’s first slab of chocolate was ready, as were its first batch of tasters  — the kids from the building.

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In 2016, the duo approached Nitin Chordia, one of the few chocolate tasters in South India, for his feedback.

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He looked them in the eye and said, “There’s something there.” However, he cautioned the duo that they still had a long way to go before Soklet’s beans could be on par with standard ones.

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The duo attended a chocolate festival in Amsterdam, where they could meet premium brands.

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These international connoisseurs of chocolate were surprised that India was on its way to producing cacao beans, something never experimented with before.

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After months of improving on the plantation process, and perfecting the chocolate making, Soklet was ready to begin sales.

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The process begins with harvesting the cacao beans from the farms at the foothills of Pollachi. The cacao pods are broken and the outer fleshy covering ‘baba’ is removed.

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The white cacao seeds are then extracted manually and filled into drums that go to the manufacturing unit. From the drums, the beans go into fermentation boxes where, depending on the climate, they are left for around a week.

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During this time, the beans puff up and change colour, turning the inside from purple to dark brown through a “secret recipe”.

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The beans are then dried, graded, roasted and broken to remove the shells. “The resulting nibs are ground. We add spices, sugars, etc to the mix and it is refined to a particle size of below 50 microns. Then conching happens,” explains Karthikeyan.

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During the conching process, which precedes the last step, the cocoa is ground into a fine paste, eliminating acidic notes.

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Then the chocolate is tempered and manually packaged, ready to serve as dessert.

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“It took us a long time to learn the tricks of the trade, and get our products on the right retail shelves,” he says, adding that with 10,000 bars of chocolate produced every month. The venture, he says, saw a turnover of Rs 5 crore in the last year.

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You can buy your share of the artisanal chocolate here.

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