While Belgians are famous for their delicious chocolates Japan is also finding favour with its own brand of luxury chocolate, particularly the highly coveted Nama, which sells from Royce’ stores across the world, including New York. Royce now finds a home in Mumbai’s Palladium mall.

Royce Chocolate Wafers

Founded in Sapporo in 1983, the superlative Royce’ chocolates are now made in Hokkaido, the remotest island on Japan’s northern coast and its agricultural heartland. The painstaking search for high quality ingredients and the secret recipe that goes into making the highly coveted Nama, the famous chocolate that costs Rs 1,000 or $16 (in Mumbai) for a small box of nine to ten pieces, has transformed Royce into a leading luxury brand of chocolates with stores across the world, including New York.

Most ingredients like butter, milk and cream are directly sourced fresh from farmers from the Japanese northern coastal town. The rest of the ingredients are sourced from the world over – the Criollo chocolate, for instance, uses Criollo, the rarest and most expensive cocoa bean in the world from Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Similarly, the Coffee Chocolate is made from coffee beans sourced from the Dominican Republic.

Avani Raheja and Sameer Gadhok

Last month, Royce opened its stand-alone store in the Palladium mall, Mumbai – an incredible journey for a brand that began life in the small town of Hokkaido and expanded nationwide by taking orders on the telephone from customers who didn’t live in the city. Client’s names and addresses were handwritten in a book and their orders were sent from the factory, a step that Royce’ considers the “beginning of our mail order system”. Even within Hokkaido, the chocolate makers begin selling to the natives by setting up a table selling their cookies, their first informal store anywhere in the world!

Royce Store in Mumbai

Royce’ is famous for its rather different approach to chocolate-making. Instead of filled bonbons, which are what most chocolate-makers concentrate on, Royce’s signature chocolate is a small flavoured square, the truffle-like and creamy Nama. Green tea, bitter dark, mild milk and white are some of the options, all made with fresh cream from farms near the factory in Hokkaido. “Qualitatively speaking, it is extremely sensitive to warmth and pressure. So it served with a special spatula that allows you to pick the chocolate without exposing the chocolate to body heat generated by your fingers. Each box is packed in a thermal bag along with a frozen cooling gel pack to maintain the right temperature,” says Avani Raheja, who has brought Royce to India with her partner, Samir Gadhok. The two run Burgundy Hospitality in Mumbai.

Criollo

At the flagship Royce’ store in Palladium mall, there are other Royce’ novelties on sale – like potato chips covered with fromage blanc, cocoa-dipped marshmallows and flat chocolate squares called Prafeuille with gooey fillings of honey, berries and caramel. Says Raheja, “At Royce’, we create chocolate rich in aromas, flavours and textures so that appeals to all of your senses. We pride ourselves in unique recipes, highest-quality ingredients and Japanese innovation in production and packaging.”

Potato Chips Covered in Chocolate

All the incredibly delicious chocolate goodies on sale in any Royce’ store anywhere in the world is directly imported from the brand’s factories in Japan, where every single piece is crafted under the watchful eyes of the founders. “Since, the shelf life of our chocolates is one to three months (as opposed to the standard 6 months and up), our team of process-engineers has worked with our Japanese counterparts in streamlining the Indian supply chain to ensure the consistent delivery of fresh and superior quality chocolate,” says Raheja.

Two days after the store opened in Palladium, the two partners invited a select group of media and patrons for a tasting session in keeping with Royce’s policy of word-of-mouth publicity and exclusive events to market the brand to a discerning group of customers.

Prafeuille Berry

While most Indians know of Belgium as the chocolate capital of the world, Nama’s reputation as the world’s most delicious chocolate, besides the heritage it comes wrapped in – a heritage linked to its Japanese values of simplicity, quality, innovation and attention to detail will give it an edge in a market that’s opening up to the idea of exotic chocolates.