How We Built Rochie Chocolates from Scratch

About this episode

In this episode of The eCom Show, host Shan A Salam talks with Asheeka Khadeeja and Suhail Roshan, the husband-and-wife founders behind Rochie Chocolates. Based in Mukkam, Kerala, the couple recount their journey building a handcrafted chocolate business from home. Asheeka shares how she pivoted from home baking to chocolates because cakes had short shelf life and unviable margins, despite widespread scepticism from relatives who favoured traditional salaried employment. Suhail discusses balancing an IT job in Dubai while designing wrappers, configuring web hosting, and managing systems remotely. The founders explain how viral Valentine's Day customised chocolate bars and election-themed wrappers drove immense media attention and nationwide bulk inquiries. They explore transitioning from Instagram chat sales to a structured ecommerce website, reinvesting television award prize money into a dedicated manufacturing unit, producing viral kunafa chocolates, and planning an academy to train aspiring chocolatiers while exploring artificial intelligence for bespoke customer personalisation.

Key takeaways

1. 1Product shelf life and raw material costs must align with business viability, which drove the strategic pivot from cakes to chocolates.
2. 2Personalised packaging and relatable character themes can turn standard confectionery into viral gifting products on social media.
3. 3Relying on direct messages and manual chat orders quickly creates an operational bottleneck as order volumes scale.
4. 4Leveraging topical events such as election campaigns can attract significant organic press coverage and institutional bulk orders.
5. 5Reinvesting business prize money and large corporate gifting sales helps bootstrap dedicated commercial production facilities.
6. 6Building an early ecommerce storefront provides legitimacy, even when the bulk of order customisation begins through social channels.

Chapters

1. 00:00Highlights
2. 02:52Chocolate Craze
3. 09:05Suhail's Take
4. 10:54Chocolate Making Videos
5. 11:36Testing the Product in Market
6. 12:36Insults from Society
7. 13:39Sales on Instagram in 2019
8. 18:50Self-Doubt and Recovery
9. 22:38Website Launch & Feed to Orphans
10. 27:06Viral Campaign
11. 35:29Election and Shafi Trends Campaign
12. 42:21Women Entrepreneurship Award
13. 50:31Expansion & System Building
14. 52:11FixMyStore.com Involvement & Kunafa Trend
15. 55:31Current Scenario & Future of Sugar Industry
16. 57:09Chocolate Academy
17. 59:22AI and Chocolate