So you have to prove yourself at every step. Speaking of challenges, she adds, “A lot of women face scepticism from colleagues and attempts to physically violate them or not take them seriously. She adds that Rishi Gour, the brand’s current CEO who joined the company in February 2020, has grown the business from 45 outlets to 85 in less than two years.įor the financial year 2021-22, Theobroma is looking to make Rs 230 crore and their profitability is in double digits, Kainaz claims. Our first operation outside Maharashtra was in Delhi in 2017,” says Kainaz. Theobroma hired Cyrus Shroff as CEO in 2013, who helped standardise production and grow the business.
We have similar beautiful spaces in Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad,” she says. I am very happy and proud to be in this space. Kainaz says that they started as a patissier, but their menu evolved to accommodate breakfast and lunch options along with Danishes, quiches, cream cheese sandwiches and other delicious savoury options.Ī post shared by Theobroma Patisserie India Mumbai, our kitchen is 25000 sq ft. The rest of the house was used for storage, and we used the hall for baking,” she recalls. That became my ‘chocolate room’, where all the pastry and chocolates were made. The only place we could afford to air-condition was the corridor. We couldn’t air-condition the place as we were trying to save money. “The goods were baked in my grandmother’s kitchen across the street. The seed money to the tune of Rs 1.5 crore came from her father, and with that, they bought the property and baking equipment. Their first outlet was at Colaba, Mumbai.
“But everyone we spoke to had very strong opinions - ‘What name is this? No one will remember it’,” she laughs, adding, “Years later, we still get called ‘De Obama’ and ‘Theo Brahma’, after the Indian deity.” “We looked up the name to find that it is the botanical name of the cocoa tree - Theobroma cacao,” says Kainaz. It was he who suggested the name ‘Theobroma’. When ideas for café names were thrown around, Kainaz’s sister Tina, a chartered accountant, was working with a commodities broker in London. “We wanted to bring items available in 5-star hotels like croissants and Christmas cakes to the streets,” she says.ĭawn of Theobroma Founder of Theobroma Kainaz Messman Harchandrai with her mother Kamal and sister Tina. So at a time when Café Coffee Day was thriving and cake shops stuck to the customary Black Forest and sugary-icing cakes, the Messman family were trying to start a neighbourhood café with a French twist. While resting her back, her family encouraged her to open a small neighbourhood café. I swam every day - through the rain and the winter,” she says. On my doctor’s advice, I started swimming to strengthen my back. I took a whole year off, and I was bedridden for three months. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else because cooking was my passion. The doctors told me I couldn’t be a chef anymore, and I’d have to find an alternate career,” shares Kainaz. Finally, my back gave way, and I had a bulging disc in 2003. “I didn’t take care of my back as a chef. But working as a chef at the Oberoi Udaivilas in Udaipur wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. She went on to study at the Oberoi School of Hotel Management. Though, it would be another seven years before she would start Theobroma in 2004 at the age of 24. “I didn’t even think about how there were very few women in the field, and I’d be an oddball,” she says. The trip inspired me to ditch law and take up the food business.”Īll her memories from her mother’s kitchen came rushing back to her when she was in France. That trip catalysed my inner chef tendencies. But when I was 16, I went to France as a Rotary Youth Exchange student. “I didn’t plan to follow in her footsteps. Very soon, they started sending their brownies via bus to different cities like Jaipur and even the South.ĭespite shadowing her mother in the kitchen and using a tweaked version of her eggless brownie recipes to date, the 42-year-old says she never planned on becoming a chef. “Standing out from egg-free cakes which were rather hard and dry, it was through so many experiments that we got the consistency of the eggless brownies right,” she says. She went on to supply her ‘vegetarian’ brownies for the Sizzling Brownie dish at a big restaurant chain, Blue Foods.” She adds, “She was probably one of the first to discover an eggless brownie recipe.
“My mother would wake up at 5 am to prepare the food and would still find time to surprise us with delicacies for lunch and dinner,” says Kainaz. While pastry shops and dessert cafés weren’t popular in the 80s, Kamal started selling cakes and pastries. “We then started selling sandwiches, burgers, chicken rolls to all the MAFCO stalls in Mumbai,” she adds.
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