From a home kitchen to a café, this chocolatier now caters to IBM, Mercedes-Benz, and Cisco

“Fifty-seven years young” Chenddyna Schae lives by working on her one true passion that was seeded way back in the 1980s: chocolate. 

She was pursuing a year-long course in Bakery and Confectionery at the International Institute of Hotel Management in Dadar Mumbai and had her first tryst with chocolate as an intern at the Taj Hotel.

“I was tasked with wrapping a huge pile of chocolate and I think my love for chocolate blossomed there,” she recalls.

Later she studied Hotel Administration and Food Technology studies at Sophia Polytechnic for two years.

Growing up in a middle-class family in Mumbai, Chenddyna  always exhibited an entrepreneurial spirit. After completing her studies she ran a small café of her own in the student town of Manipal, where her father was working. 

ALSO READ

How this IIT-Delhi alumna is fighting pollution with air quality monitors

“I moved back to Mumbai and worked in restaurants and hotels for a while but gave up to start a small chocolate making unit at home called Black magic Chocolates and earned a good brand name and success,” she recalls.

However, within five years she had to move to Dandeli in North Karnataka after her marriage in 1991 and subsequently had to shut shop and put a rein on her business endeavours for a while.

Nevertheless, Chenddyna says, “For the first ten years, I did not work and was happy looking after my two sons.”

Second innings

Chenddyna was not without work, though. Her husband hailed from a business family, and women too pitched in, in whatever way they could.

When the family moved to Bengaluru in 2001, her husband’s business went through a rough patch. 

“Expenses were increasing. We stayed in a rented house and the school was far more expensive than any school in Dandeli. That is when I thought it was time for me to get back to work,” she says, adding that she could make use of the time between 8.30 am and 4.30 pm when the children were at school.

With an initial investment of Rs 10,000, Chenddyna revisited her passion and experimented with chocolate making in her kitchen in June the same year. Chenddyna went to Singapore in August to receive training in the making of Belgian Chocolate at Barry Callebaut. 

She started her business just a few days before Diwali in October., “I took up a counter at a shop called the Bombay Store in MG Road. We started samples from there and built up a stock for Diwali.” 

In the first year, Chenddyna managed to make Rs 1,50,000 worth of sales through retail and corporate orders.

Banking on the profits, she bought a plot of land in 2008, built Jus’ Trufs café and also converted a floor in the building into a chocolate factory. 

Notably, the factory makes bean to bar chocolates where they take care of the entire process from grinding cocoa beans to making chocolates.

This also allows them to customise according to rising needs and concern around sugar consumption by offering specialised jaggery chocolates as well. 

Over the years, Chenddyna has undergone a number of training sessions under chocolate masters from Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, the UK, and Germany, during her visits abroad.

In nearly two decades since starting Jus’ Trufs, the entrepreneur has gone from offering only customised chocolate to different kinds of food in the café. It also hosts events and birthday parties for children.

Some of its major corporate clients include Mercedes-Benz, Audi, IBM, Cisco, Volvo, Palo Alto networks, and Epsilon, among others. 

According to Chenddyna, the business grew from making around Rs 65 lakh in 2009 to hitting the Rs 1 crore revenue mark in 2011. 

ALSO READ

This musician quit her corporate job to turn entrepreneur and benefit people with music

Business lessons

In 2009, Chenddyna was selected to be part of Goldman Sachs’ global initiative to uplift women entrepreneurs called 10,000 Women.     

“We went to Indian School of Business in Hyderabad as part of the programme. We thought we were nothing and there, the MBA students would come to us and ask questions related to entrepreneurship,” she shares, adding that it was one of her most memorable moments as an entrepreneur.

Her biggest lesson as an entrepreneur, she says, has been never to give up on one’s dream.  “It is going to be difficult in the first few years, especially if you are bootstrapped, there will be moments of doubt but it’s all worth it,” she adds. 

At the end of the day, she believes persistence and believing in oneself and team members will pay off.