The Better India · 6 hours ago

Raipur’s Saraf Family Built Manorama Industries Using Forest Seeds for Chocolate & Beauty Products

A woman grinding seeds at home in the 1940s. A man who couldn't afford a trade fair stall, so he put the products on his own body. These are the quiet, unglamorous origins of what is now a Rs 1,357-crore global business - and the throughline connecting them is a kind of stubborn, inventive faith in what others overlook. Janakilal Agarwal discovered that banana peels, mango kernels, and sal seeds "could yield oils useful in chocolate-making," and spent years carrying that unlikely truth to anyone willing to listen, eventually finding in Michael Ferrero someone who did. Today, Manorama Industries sources its ingredients from forest-dwelling women across five Indian states, meaning the hands that first touched these seeds belong not to scientists or executives, but to people at the margins of the global economy - whose labor now reaches 84 countries. There is something worth sitting with in that: the way value, so often chased in grand gestures, keeps turning up in what was already there, waiting to be seen.