Hot chocolate is always our best friend during the winter. Winter temperatures might breach your trust, but hot chocolate will always get your back. Do you love hot chocolate? Of course, yes! I don’t know why I keep you asking these stupid questions.
If you are a hot chocolate lover, then imagine, you are sitting on a mountain with cold breezes and a cup of hot chocolate in hand. Sounds astonishing, right? What if you got the best hot chocolate and organic hot coffee powder? You will be the happiest person on earth.
When talking about hot chocolates, it becomes important to talk about Tiggle.Tiggle? Yes! The first affordable Indian organic hot chocolate brand was developed by a female entrepreneur, Anuva Kakkar.
Who is she? How does she start? What was her inspiration? Why an organic hot chocolate brand? My readers always have a lot of questions on their minds, and as a responsible writer, I answer them all. So what are you waiting for? Let's go!
Who is Anuva Kakkar?
Anuva Kakkar is a 23-year-old female entrepreneur and mind behind the hot chocolate brand, Tiggle. Born and raised in Agra, Anuva grew up in an upper-middle-class household. Anuva’s father is a small business owner, and her mother is a baker.
Why a Hot Chocolate Powder Brand?
While working for a startup company called UrbanClap ( now Urban Company), the idea of Tiggle first came into Anuva’s mind.
In conversation with The Better India, Anuva said, “I am a lover of hot chocolate. One day, while working in Gurugram, I began craving a cup of hot chocolate. As a fresher starting her professional career, I would have to travel or order from a cafe and just spend Rs 200 on a cup. I could only afford this a couple of times a month. Instead of figuring out how to budget for my hot chocolate cravings, I thought why not make it at home. This turned out to be a terrible idea because of the lack of quality hot chocolate mixes on the market.”
How did her Journey Start?
Whenever Anuva visited outlets or any retail store, the only beverages she could find were tea or coffee. That was when she thought about building a new beverage section and elevating hot chocolate to the status of tea or coffee.
She began to manufacture her hot chocolate, but she was wondering about the market value of the product. To find out what strangers thought of her hot chocolate, she started selling it on the street. The stall and her hard work were a great success, and she ended up partnering up with a kiosk in a metro station.
Soon, she realized that this was not a scalable business and thus decided to sell good quality chocolate mix instead of the drink. That was the moment when Tiggle, the D2C hot chocolate brand, was born.
How did Tiggle become a brand?
The vision was to make a hot chocolate brand affordable and premium. Anuva recalls it in one of her interviews by saying, “I began reaching out to people in this field to formulate my hot chocolate powder recipe. By March 2020, I was in Himachal Pradesh, selling my hot chocolate mix to cafes and taking their feedback when the pandemic struck. Although the pandemic brought a long pause to my vision of starting a venture, it also gave me time to learn about online advertising, marketing, how to package a product, etc. I also spent the next four to five months talking to a variety of people and finding farms and farmers in India growing premium cocoa.”
After a lot of research and ordering about fifty cocoa samples from farms across the country, she finally partnered with one forty-acre family-owned organic farm in Pollachi, Tamil Nadu. The idea was not only to make a premium coffee brand but also to find ways to positively impact the farmers who are growing them. She claims that the cocoa grown on the farm is free of chemicals and pesticides.
The Tiggle started in January 2021. Sharing her roller coaster journey, Anuva said, “When we started Tiggle in January 2021, we would source about 5-10 kg of cocoa a month, but now it’s about 400-500 kg. This cocoa is directly shipped from Pollachi to our manufacturing unit in Agra. We dedicated the first year of our operations to selling directly through our website, running Facebook and Google ads. Before launching Tiggle, we put in the work of developing a well-designed website. After developing the product, we built an online community around it, giving our customers the latest on every new development.”
What’s Next?
Day by day, Anuva’s business is reaching new heights. The venture has started selling its brand on Amazon and Flipkart. In terms of her future goals, Anuva, in one of her interviews, said, “We will spend the coming year finding ways of expanding our manufacturing capabilities and consider ways of obtaining some external funding.” Last year was all about setting up our base. Recently, we launched our first organic jaggery (which we source from a farm outside Pune) based hot chocolate mix. We plan on launching more flavors of hot chocolate and aim to raise hot chocolate to the status of coffee.
The Final Words
Age is just a number. Anuva started her business at the age of 21 and now she is 23 years old. There was a time when she was alone selling hot chocolates on the streets. And now, she has not just established a brand but is also giving employment opportunities to the women who lost their jobs during the lockdown. Not only women entrepreneurs but women who aspire to start their entrepreneurial journey look to her as an inspiration.
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