For decades, premium chocolate in India has largely meant imported Belgian and Swiss brands, but three-year-old homegrown player Manam Chocolate believes that is beginning to change.
The Hyderabad-based company, which sells everything from chocolate bars and gifting boxes to pastries, desserts and beverages, is expanding aggressively across the National Capital Region and other major cities as it looks to capture a larger share of the country’s premium chocolate market.
This category, Manam estimates, does around ₹5,000 crore of business each year and is still dominated by imported brands.
Fresh funding
This week, it raised $9 million (about ₹86 crore) in a Series A funding round led by Omnivore VC, with participation from the real estate company Turner Morrison.
The fresh capital will be used to fund the retail expansion plan, strengthen teams and build the institutional capabilities.
“We have a retail rollout planned for the next four years. This fundraising is really about fuelling the next 24 months,” said Chaitanya Muppala, founder of Manam Chocolate and chief executive of Distinct Origins Pvt. Ltd, the company’s parent.
Manam currently operates a store in Hyderabad’s Banjara Hills, a beverage bar in Hyderabad’s Knowledge City and a flagship outlet in New Delhi. It also plans to open four more outlets across the NCR in the coming months before entering either Mumbai or Bengaluru.
Unlike half a dozen bean-to-bar chocolate brands, he said the company is not targeting the niche craft chocolate market. “We are not chasing the bean-to-bar market. We are chasing the ₹5,000-crore premium chocolate market,” he added.
According to him, nearly ₹4,500 crore of that market is currently dominated by imported brands or products.
The company has built a business around gifting, confectionery, desserts, and beverages, rather than focusing solely on chocolate bars, and also sells beans, as it works with 250-odd farms in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. It also works with some farmers in Kerala.
Gifting accounts for the largest share of its revenue, while e-commerce contributes around 20% of sales. Quick commerce, too, is about roughly half of its online business.
He said the company’s revenue will grow to about ₹125 crore in 2026-27 from around ₹53 crore in 2025-26 and is targeting operating break-even over the next year.
“We’re projecting about ₹260 crore the year after,” he added.
The premium chocolate market
India’s premium chocolate and confectionery market is nimble but expanding. Mint reported on 2 June that Adani-backed chocolate retailer Cococart expects to sustain annual growth of 35-40% over the next five years, driven by airport retail, quick commerce and an expansion into international food and beverage brands.
The retailer operates 61 stores and reported revenue of around ₹254 crore in 2024-25, and is targeting a significantly larger business by 2030.
Category experts said Manam’s fundraising reflects a broader shift in how investors view premium Indian food brands. “This fundraising is significant not because it validates one company, but because it validates an entire category that is still in its infancy,” said L. Nitin Chordia, chief incubation officer, Cocoashala.
He estimated the bean-to-bar chocolate market at just ₹55 crore in 2025, compared with the ₹1,000-crore imported premium chocolate segment, highlighting the nascent stage of the category despite its growth potential.
Cocoshala is an educational initiative and an incubation centre for the domestic bean-to-bar industry.
Unlike coffee, wine or craft spirits, Indian bean-to-bar chocolate remains a relatively underdeveloped category, with many consumers continuing to associate premium chocolate with European brands, particularly Belgian and Swiss labels, he said.
“Manam has built what is essentially an experience-led retail destination where chocolate is the centrepiece, but storytelling and aspiration are equally important. In many ways, it has created a blueprint for how premium Indian chocolate can be introduced to Indian consumers,” Chordia told Mint.
He added that after coffee chain and retailer Subko, Manam is only the second Indian bean-to-bar chocolate company to attract institutional capital, signalling growing investor interest in premium Indian food categories as brand-building opportunities rather than simply manufacturing businesses.
Manam also operates a large cacao fermentation facility in Andhra Pradesh, Muppala said. “We start much before the bean. We work with soil, farming practices and post-harvest processing,” he added.
“India accounts for less than 0.5% of global cacao production and imports more than 70% of its requirements. We are attempting to position Indian cacao as a premium product,” Muppala said.
The company has begun exporting cacao beans to Swiss chocolate makers, who are using Indian-origin beans in speciality chocolate products. Muppala said proprietary post-harvest processing techniques have helped create flavour profiles that command significantly higher prices than commodity cacao. These exports account for about 5% of its business.
“Consumers are increasingly interested in what they’re eating, how it’s produced and where it comes from. We’re trying to build a category around premium chocolate for India, from India,” he added.
