Kainaz Messman Harchandrai and the story of Theobroma's rapid growth

Kainaz Messman Harchandrai is turning Theobroma, her mother's beloved desserts business, into a national cake shop chain

One likely reason why Kainaz Messman Harchandrai was popular in school was the hoard of handmade chocolates she would bring to distribute among her teenaged classmates. Her mother Kamal, a home caterer, used to whip these up with cocoa, icing sugar, butter, and lavish splashes of rum. There was “so much alcohol in the old-fashioned candy” that afterwards, in the maths period, the numbers would dance. “We would hardly follow the class,” she reminisces, with a giggle.

Kainaz and her sister Tina grew up in an enticingly aromatic environment. Her mother sold those heady rum chocolates and chocolate orange mousse cakes to clients in their South Mumbai neighbourhood of Cusrow Baug, as well as in Cuffe Parade and Churchgate. Kamal was also known for baking “shape cakes” in the form of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck at a time when these were not readily available. With little advertising and no social media to rely on in the 1990s, the girls helped her take orders, bake and wrap the desserts.

Where Kainaz later trained as a chef at Mumbai’s Institute of Hotel Management and Delhi’s Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development, Tina who is a gifted yet quite reluctant cook, sought a career in finance instead which took her to London. In 2004, Kainaz paired a desire to show off her mother’s signature recipes with another desire to introduce Indians to European classics like many-layered croissants and fruit tartes, which led to her opening a French-style café, Theobroma. Now, with the family’s homespun business fast becoming a national chain, the sisters have co-written a book, Baking a Dream: The Theobroma Story, about that journey.

At age 16, through a Rotary exchange programme, Kainaz had spent a year in Albi, a red-brick town in France. Scores of little patisseries there took care of local families’ cake and bread needs, and for the first time in these simple establishments, she tasted buttery strawberry-crowned tarts, pain au chocolat and pain aux raisins. During monthly trips to the nearest big city, Toulouse, she sampled finer things like blue cheese and wine. Unsurprisingly, upon returning to India, she wanted to study food. Apart from her own mother, the 19th-century chef, Marie-Antoine Carême, perhaps the world’s first celebrity chef, and his follower Georges Auguste Escoffier, legendary for having simplified French cooking techniques, act as sources of inspiration.

For some years after chef school and before she injured her back, Kainaz made pastries in a five-star kitchen. A bulging disc was grazing her nerve and restricted her to bed for three months. She used this time to recover and, encouraged by her family, to dream up the café venture. “My father thought I would have easier hours in a solo business than at the hotel. Of course, he was wrong about that.” The bakery and café was entirely uncharted territory, but the experience of working in a restaurant did prepare her for how to think about maintenance and planning.

As with any enterprise of this sort, it took a village to get things rolling. Kainaz attributes every action related to her business to a collective “we” rather than just herself. Her father found the first shop space just outside Cusrow Baug, and helped with seed money. The young chef had insisted that her designer, who had worked on homes but never a retail outlet, fit in wooden floors, which sadly wore out within weeks. There was not enough capital to hire professionals so her mother’s cake business assistant joined their kitchen, along with another untrained cook. Her grandmother’s old flat in Colaba became her first commercial kitchen. Tina, who was pregnant then, flew in to help with opening day. 

The name they chose for the new patisserie, on the suggestion of one of Tina’s colleagues, was a mouthful. Theobroma, Greek for ‘food of the gods’, is also the formal title of the cacao tree. The effort people put into remembering the complex name ended up helping with brand recall, says Kainaz. Like the menu — a mix of Kamal’s favourites and less-known international pastries — the clientele was also a mix of old and first-time faces. From the very first day and for several days thereafter, according to her, there were queues and some items sold out swiftly. The runaway hit was the soft walnut- and chocolate chip-studded brownie, based on her mother’s original recipe, which “no matter how many trays we made, ran out every day”.

While the France-trained chef wanted to steer clear of any obvious offerings, people would often walk in asking for comfort food like blackforest cakes, pineapple pastries and Parsi chicken puffs. “There was a point when I realised I am not in the business to feed my ego but to serve people and make them happy.” The menu has since grown to include familiar flavours, and Kainaz now listens carefully “when anyone talks about their favourite foods, their food likes and dislikes, what they want to eat when they are feeling unwell”. In all the attention to sweets, she admits that bread had became something of a step child. She was compelled to take a course in bread-making and grow that category to include multigrain loaves, focaccia, and lavash when a retailer wanted to bring her on as a supplier but asked for savoury staples as well.

Until a few years ago, Theobroma brownies were a quintessential treat that anyone visiting from Mumbai was expected to bring along. Now they are available in other locations in the country. Kainaz and her family were too preoccupied with the kitchen to pay attention but they had broken even by the end of the first year. Over a decade later, in 2017, they decided to scale up the business with the help of private equity funding. That led to forming a chain of 52 cafés, express shops and kiosks across Pune, Delhi and the NCR. Theobroma is eyeing Bengaluru and Hyderabad next.

Each new city comes with its own peculiarities. “Managing remote teams and ensuring consistent quality and service is our biggest challenge,” she notes. Further, the quality of ingredients and palates vary too. In Mumbai, for instance, the patties are sweet and sour because people are familiar with Gujarati flavours, and the Parsi-style mayo is infused with mustard, pepper and garlic. These were adapted to suit the Delhi foodie’s palate which seems to favour spicier items. During the first Delhi opening two years ago, people showed up even without the family having roped in a publicist. “Our reputation got them to our door,” says Kainaz, adding with founder’s pride, “but our product has kept them coming back.”