We were lucky to catch up with Elliott Curelop recently and have shared our conversation below.

Elliott, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

Harshit, my husband is from Mumbai, India. His mom, Madhu is an amazing cook and she makes delicious both savory and desserts and she knows how to use spices in the right way. It’s kind of some magic she has in her hands when it comes to cooking.

One of our signature chocolate – Masala Chai – 60% Cacao has the same chai blend which she likes to use to make her morning and evening tea back in India. It has the same five spices in the same proportions she likes them added to loose leaf tea. It was just appropriate and made total sense for us to name the business after her. And in Hindi, Madhu means “honey” or “sweet” – it was just a perfect name for our sweet business.

Elliott, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We’re an Indian inspired bean-to-bar chocolate business based out of Austin, TX. My husband Elliott and I are the partners in this business and our love for food, flavors and chocolate came together to create this line of unique sweets. We source our cacao from the Tumaco region of Colombia and Idukki Hills region of Kerala, India, then roast, crack, winnow, grind, flavor, temper and wrap all our bars by hand. From the beautiful packaging inspired by Indian textiles, to the gorgeous bars themselves, Madhu chocolate is a true labor of love.

Chocolate lovers who enjoy experimenting with new flavors, tastes, and spices are the customers we really love to share these artisanal chocolates with.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

It’s been a very organic growth for us. We manage our social media ourselves – don’t have any social media manager to get help from. As we’re manufacturers of our own products it is a little easier to come up with the content, because we have control on the entire production process. To grow the social media presence, you’ve to be vulnerable, you’ve to put yourselves out to the social media world. People want to see the faces behind the products, they want to see your struggles, they want to see your inspirations, they want to see behind the scenes of how you make it.

Early in the business we realized we want to use this social media platform to also talk about our lives, how Madhu Chocolate is important to us, how Madhu Chocolate has given us a platform to voice our opinions, how day-to-day political affairs matters and affects us and that in turn affects Madhu Chocolate. We’re 100% LGBT owned business, immigrant owned, BIPOC owned – basically a minority-owned business and today’s politics have lots of implications on minority communities.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

Craft chocolate making is a piece of art. The process from cacao beans to a chocolate bar is long, needs a long patience, needs a lot of skills, needs a lot of specialized industrial equipments. Each chocolate bar we make takes around 4-5 days in total.

We used to make chocolate as a hobby at our home kitchen. We had a small machine which had a small drum with granite base sitting on two granite wheels. With some store bought cacao nibs, cocoa butter and sugar we would play around with making chocolate. From there the enthusiasm grew and started working with Indian spices and chocolate together and came up with Madhu Chocolate. I have a food science degree and I understand flavors, chemistry with flavors. That understanding definitely helped us in our R&D process. The entire chocolate making process has been self taught by reading lots of books, videos on youtube, blogs from expert chocolate makers.

Having patience, learning how to fix machines, dealing with gears, machine assembly – you learn it all. Manufacturing a product and scaling up are two different games – when it comes to volume everything changes. Principles remain the same but now you’ve apply those basic principles to make bigger and larger batches which means you have to optimize your operations, tweak the production processes to make it more efficient.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://madhuchocolate.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/madhuchocolate/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/madhuchocolate
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/madhuchocolate
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/madhuchocolate

Image Credits
Nitya Jain Photography