• Women Entrepreneur

If I had any doubts about how well Kainaz Messman’s Theobroma is doing, they were fast dispelled late on a Tuesday morning. The café was packed to the gills and minutes were spent on finding a table we could chat at.

Literally meaning ‘Food of the Gods’ in Greek, Theobroma’s success becomes more laudable upon learning that this quaint café owes its existence to an extraordinary stroke of bad luck.

Five years ago, Messman was happily working as a pastry chef at the plush Oberoi Udaivilas. But tragedy struck a year into the job when she was diagnosed with a slipped disc; doctors said her days of working at the Oberoi kitchen were over. “But I couldn’t imagine myself not cooking anymore,” says Messman, “That kind of preponed Theobroma by a decade, at least.”

For the café, Messman drew on all the patisserie-hopping she had done on an exchange program to France. There, she saw firsthand how the French working class has easy access to the most scrumptious of croissants and pastries, while the same class in India can only get that in either 5-star hotels or at really high-end restaurants,” she says.

Sensing the opportunity, Messman launched Theobroma in October 2004, after pitching in an investment of Rs.1.5 crore and a staff of five, including her mother.

Pricing her range of scrumptious, high-end croissants, brownies and cakes between Rs.20 to Rs.1,300, it seems Messman knew exactly who her consumers would be and what they’d come in for. In the early days, executives and families visited Theobroma purely out of curiosity—but then they never really left. Within weeks, there were long queues at the café and stock for three days would vanish in hours.

“The continued response was such that we broke even within the first year,” says Messman. “We have grown at over 60 percent year-on-year since then. I now have a staff of over 60, two kitchens and we are still overstretched.”
It helps that Messman is getting the location right. The first branch  is located in the heart of South Bombay, the city’s commercial nerve center, while the second branch opened in Bandra recently, the cultural nerve center.

“Success has created a whole new set of questions for me,” Messman confesses. “I am grappling with options as to how to grow this business. A lot of my time goes into sorting through them.” Franchising opportunities and offers to set up branches by bigger entities have been pouring her way, but she has steadfastly declined them.

“I learnt my trade in Albi in France, where cafés prided themselves on the homely feel,” she says. “That feeling also makes Theobroma tick. I fear that franchising and opening multiple locations would diminish that special feeling.”
Touche, Theobroma’s customers would surely say.

©Entrepreneur April 2010

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cafe, chef, Kainaz Messman, pastry, Theobroma