(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 con