Coimbatore Wet Grinder: The unlikely appliance at the heart of the global artisanal chocolate revolution

Today is World Chocolate Day. Celebrated on July 7 to mark the anniversary of the introduction of chocolate to Europe in 1550, the day serves as a great excuse for chocolatiers and chocoholics alike to showcase and binge on the best chocolates.

India’s relationship with chocolate too has evolved from a time when Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and Five Star were the only options available to most. And factory-made bars – from Nestlé and Toblerone to Lindt and Hershey – continue to occupy prime spots in supermarket aisles and neighbourhood grocery stores, artisanal chocolates enjoy their own niche popularity.

In the last few years, countries including, Ecuador and Ghana that supplied cacao beans but never made chocolate have also joined the bandwagon. Our neighbours, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have also entered the bean-to-bar market.

The artisanal chocolate movement began in India about a decade ago with brands such as Mason and Co, Navilula (formerly Earth Loaf) and Pascati. Today, we have 32 brands to savour and an industry that has been growing at an annual rate of 50 per cent with an estimated worth at Rs 45 crores. At the heart of this revolution is an unlikely appliance: the Coimbatore Wet Grinder.

Available in different sizes – from a two kilogram tabletop version to a 50 kg industrial edition – the grinder takes over two crucial stages of chocolate making.

What makes the Coimbatore Wet Grinder so critical to the artisanal chocolate industry is that it remains the only appliance that can replicate, at a small scale, the functions of industrial machines that churn out millions of chocolate bars a year.

Intriguingly, it wasn’t designed to make chocolates at all.

How far will you go for a dosa?

One PB Krishnamurthy of Coimbatore is credited with the invention of the Coimbatore Wet Grinder. The story goes that when his mother couldn’t prepare the dosa batter because of a backache and serve him dosa one morning, Krishnamurthy set out to invent an appliance that could make it easier for her to grind the dosa batter.

Krishnamurthy fixed a motor to a mortar-and-pestle setup in a manner that the rotation of the bottom stone would help grind the rice into a thick consistent batter from which his favourite dosas and idlis could be made. His mother no longer needed to go through hard physical labour of grinding the soaked rice and urad dal. All she needed to do was turn on a switch.

Sensing a business opportunity, Krishnamurthy took his innovation to the market and, with an investment of Rs 8,000, launched Sri Lakshmi Industries in 1963. Krishnamurthy’s invention gathered steam and more manufacturers emerged.

The granite stone required for the production came from Uthukuli, some 40 km from Coimbatore and the city soon became a manufacturing hub for wet grinders. So much so that they came to be known by the city name. Today, Coimbatore Wet Grinders have a Geographical Indications (GI) tag.

From idli and dosas to artisanal chocolates

When Coimbatore-based Ashwin Kumar received a call one afternoon in 2001 from one John Nanci asking if the idli and dosa batter grinders he made could also be used to make chocolates, he was tempted to dismiss it as a prank.

“At the time I was manufacturing and exporting idli grinders to Indians living abroad,” Kumar says over a phone call. As he recollects, Nanci was interested in making artisanal chocolates and replicating the traditional way of chocolate making in Europe.

“He had studied that until industrialisation, chocolate in Europe was traditionally made using stone grinders and had somehow discovered that Indians had been using similar machines to grind idli and dosa batter.”

Could the same grinders be used to grind cocoa beans perhaps? As it turns out yes. Except there was one tiny problem.

Kumar explains: “The wet grinder is designed to run for no longer than an hour at a stretch. To make chocolate, it would be required to run for 24 to 100 hours non-stop else the chocolate would solidify. So, Nanci requested us to tweak our stone grinder design so they could run for longer.”

As was wont, Kumar and Nanci’s first experiment ended in a disaster. “The motor burnt out immediately. Surely what was designed to run for an hour could not run for 24 hours. So, we kept tinkering with the design. It took us six months to succeed.”

Today, Kumar’s company Spectra, exports seven different models to 25 countries. “Except, nobody calls it the wet grinder in the chocolate industry. They call it the stone melanger,” he says.

A happy churn of events

Venkat Vishwas Ravi is the COO of Sri Lakshmi Industries and grandson of our dosa-deprived innovator, PB Krishnamurthy. Like Spectra, Sri Lakshmi too has added the stone melanger to its manufacturing roster.

Ravi explains the difference between an idli wet grinder and a stone melanger: “For cocoa grinding, we make adjustments to the motor capacity and offer more ventilation to all the running parts to reduce wear and tear.

“The grinders have a built-in ventilation system to let in cool air and push out hot air. A special gearbox for cocoa grinding can withstand heavy loads during the grinding process and addition of tension screws helps in adjusting pressure applied to crush the cocoa beans,” Ravi explains. “The grinders also come with a speed control system and better-quality cables.”

Today, Ravi exports melangers to clients across the globe, including Honduras and Canada.

Ushering in a sweet revolution, one batch at a time

Nitin Chordia, India’s first certified chocolate taster is also one of Ravi’s oldest clients. He credits the evolution of the artisanal chocolate industry to the melanger. “The entire bean-to-bar artisanal industry in the world has progressed only because of these stone grinders,” he says adding that India exports almost 95 per cent of these machines to the world. Chordia is always amused at the response he gets from people who realise the melanger is nothing but a modified wet stone grinder. “In South India, people find it common but when people in North India realise it is similar to an idli batter grinder, they are surprised and laugh in disbelief,” he says.

As with Coimbatore Wet Grinders, melangers are available in different sizes – 1-2 kg to 50 kg and cost anywhere between Rs 20,000 and Rs 2 lakh. They are designed to run for 24 to 100 hours; with most brands using them non-stop, stopping only to change the batch.

Vikas Temani, co-founder of the Ernakulam-based artisanal chocolate company Paul and Mike, uses 25 kg melangers to produce special edition chocolates. “The melanger allows you to grind the cacao beans and also reduce the mixture of chocolate, milk, and sugar by mixing it continuously for 24-72 hours. This fine particle size is what lends the chocolate its mouthfeel, the reason we eat chocolate.

“The action of the wheels also removes the harsh astringent, bitter, and acidic notes,” he explains. “We use it to make our Thandai Chocolate. This recipe requires almond flour and spices. Using a small grinder ensures we get the perfect batch size, and we don’t have to wash the big tanks to remove the leftover aromas.”

The varying sizes of melangers also make them efficient for R&D. So, chocolatiers could make batches as small as a couple of kilos reducing their investment in trials to as low as Rs 1,000 per kg.

This is a boon for someone such as Chef Sanjana Patel of the Mumbai-based bean-to-bar chocolatier La Folie that specialises in small batch chocolates. Thanks to the tabletop melangers, Patel is able to control the temperature, understand how the cacao beans are releasing the oils and fats, and increase or decrease the pressure to achieve certain consistency or flavour.

Whether in Mumbai or Tegucigalpa, Ernakulam or Toronto, chocolatiers like Patel and Temani are pushing the boundaries of what they can do with cacao beans. In this endeavour, where tradition meets innovation, the Coimbatore Wet Grinder has emerged as their unlikely partner.

From its humble origins as an idli-dosa grinder, this unassuming appliance has become the backbone of the global artisanal chocolate revolution. In doing so, it has also opened doors for small-scale chocolatiers, offering them an opportunity to not just earn a livelihood but also experiment with their craft in a way that chocolatiers before them simply couldn’t. And to think it all began one morning in a sleepy town in south India.

Phorum Pandya is a Mumbai-based journalist covering food, travel, and lifestyle.