Ravalgaon’s Cheery sweets.
In the recently-released Hindi film Kapoor & Sons, Alia Bhatt’s character is on the hunt for Phantom cigarettes when Sidharth Malhotra’s character whisks her away. About ten scenes later, Malhotra’s character goes down on bended knee and offers her the candy cigarette. While discussing the movie with my friend, film reviewer Raja Sen, we got talking about the nostalgia value of packaged foods from our childhood that are hard to come by now. After a recent Fatafat buying spree in Delhi, I’d been thinking about confections of the past, and decided to find out how the companies that manufacture some of them have managed to stay in business all this while.
Cheery and Assorted Centre sweets by the Ravalgaon Sugar Farm Ltd.
Drive five hours north east from Mumbai, past Nashik, not far from Malegaon (the same town known for its spoofs of Bollywood movies), and you’ll reach Ravalgaon, a village where so much candy is made, we knew about the brand of sweets named after it way before we had heard of the place. The story of how the village became a candy factory starts in 1923 when industrialist Walchand Hirachand was informed by a government official about an area of arid land in Maharashtra that had the potential for agricultural success.
Hirachand strongly believed that India could rid itself of colonial exploitation if it established industries rooted in agriculture but developed through modern technology. His business at the time was construction and heavy engineering, so he brought in earth-moving equipment, turned the soil and did several crop trials. A decade later, he’d converted 1,500 acres into sugar plantations and a sugar mill, and Ravalgaon’s rural pocket into a township. In the 1940s, the business diversified into candy: an orange-flavoured hard-boiled sweet and a milk toffee named Laco.
Over the last 75 years, the Ravalgaon Sugar Farm Ltd. has supplied many of the most memorable confectioneries (and confectionery ads) of our childhood and young adult years: Pan Pasand, Mango Mood, Coffee Break. But two of their products that haven’t been as heavily promoted are so ubiquitous and recognisable, that whenever I think of brightly-coloured sweets, I think of them: Cheery and Assorted Center. Until I started working on this story, I didn’t call them by those names. I just referred to them as Ravalgaon hard sweet and Ravalgaon soft-centred sweet.
“Cheery used to be called Cherry,” said Nihal Doshi, the company’s executive director. “It became a generic name like truffles and eclairs. However we were told that we couldn’t trademark the name since cherries are (obviously) an English word for a kind of fruit. So someone cleverly used Cheery, a similar-sounding word with the right connotations for the brand.” Cheery comes in three flavours, orange, lemon and raspberry (surprisingly, there’s no cherry). In each, the slightly rough texture scratches your tongue and under the scraping (though entirely pleasant) sourness, there’s a steady base note of sweetness.
I always thought the scratchiness of the candy was the result of a manufacturing defect, but Doshi said the small round bumps on the sweet serve a specific purpose. They’re there explicitly to lightly scratch our taste buds. This highlights the sourness of the flavour, cuts through the candy’s monotonous sweetness and makes our mouths water. Assorted Center, which comes in orange, lemon, raspberry and pineapple flavours, is essentially Cheery with a soft centre.
Though many people might think of Ravalgaon’s traditional hard-boiled sweets as old-fashioned these days, Doshi said he’s seen consumers employ them in inventive new ways: as a flavouring in cocktails, as a topping for ice cream, and as a powder in sweet paan (a resourceful home baker has even used them to make stained-glass cookies). For the majority of people who take their sweets the time-honoured way, good old orange is still the favourite flavour, the bestseller for both Cheery and Assorted Center, said Doshi. Raspberry is the polariser; people either love it or abhor it.
Get Ravalgaon sweets at your local kirana store or paanwalla or online here and here.
Phantom Cigarettes and Gold Coin by Harnik General Foods Pvt. Ltd.
In the 1970s, N. L. Hingorani, a graduate from Banaras Hindu University’s Center for Food Science and Technology, had a day job handling quality control at the Pune-based Sathe Biscuits & Chocolate Co. Ltd. He also had big plans. His great passion was inventing food products so every evening after work, Hingorani would fire up a food lab at home. After a few years of experiments, he had created a product that would change the fortunes of his family, and form part of the childhood of generations of Indians yet to be born – Phantom Sweet Cigarettes. There’s no candy quite like it. Much more than just mint and vanilla, it has the ability to make kids feel grown-up and grown-ups feel like kids again.
I went to an all-girls school. During our lunch break, one of us would go to a store and buy a pack of Phantoms (with an illustration of a masked man who may or may not look the titular character from an American comic strip). First, we’d wet the red tip at the far end of the cigarette and apply it on our lips. (To us, Phantom cigarettes were lip stains before lip stains were a thing.) Next, we’d flip the cigarette and see who could whittle it away into the sharpest point without breaking the candy stick. The girl who bought the pack would get dibs on solving the puzzle at the back.
Like me, almost everyone kid of the 1980s and ’90s has their own memories of the sweet. Artist Jitish Kallat, who was born and raised in Mumbai, admitted they were a childhood guilty pleasure; Manish Mehrotra, the celebrated chef at Indian Accent in Delhi, has featured them in his restaurant’s nostalgia-soaked menus. It’s not like there weren’t candy cigarettes before Phantom. “They were imported and not easily available,” said Gautam Harnik, Hingorani’s grandson and the director and CEO at Harnik General Foods Pvt. Ltd, the manufacturers of Phantom. “[Plus] they had paper rolled on each stick, and the candy seemed to have a mouthfeel that was more like chalk.” Harnik General Foods, incidentally, also makes a large variety of baking ingredients, instant food mixes, and an assortment of other lesser-known sweets including Chupa Chup lollipops (not to be confused with Spanish brand Chupa Chups).
What completely threw me off was the other school-time favourite listed at the top of their online confectionery catalogue: Gold Coin, the foil-wrapped, embossed caramel toffee that looks like a doubloon. The caramel is no longer as butter-rich as it was back in the day, but this hasn’t diminished the candy’s popularity. “In south India, I hear they give little baskets of Gold Coin toffees as gifts at weddings and festivals,” said Gautam Harnik who told me he isn’t bothered about competition from multinationals.
“Our old products hold a lot of memories,” he said. “Since these are from a time when the company was still finding its ground, they have a special place for everyone involved in our entire channel of distribution.” In the case of Phantom cigarettes, because the production process, which involves ensuring that the cigarettes are consistently smooth and sturdy, is so time-consuming, his company is not able to keep up with customer demand. Interestingly, the head office sends out approximately 100 boxes of 24 packs every week directly to consumers who call them and ask for bulk quantities.
Phantom Sweet Cigarettes are available online here. To order packs and Gold Coin directly from Harnik, contact them here.
Sosyo by Hajoori & Sons
In 1923, in Surat, the brothers Hajoori, Abbas Abdul Rahim and Mohsin, started taking refilling orders for the British bottled drink Vimto. In 1938, influenced by the Swadeshi movement, they decided to discontinue working for the foreign company and start focusing on selling the fizzy juice-based soft drink brand that in 1927 they had developed on their own.
Some news reports claim that the original name of the ‘goti soda’ (literally, ‘marble soda’ because the bottles were sealed with round marbles) was Whiskey No, because it upheld the principles of Prohibition. Ironically, fans have long claimed it tastes like wine or rum and whiskey and mixed with cola. The only thing that Hajoori & Sons has revealed so far is that the secret recipe of the dark, cider-style, deeply-sweet, strictly non-alcoholic refreshment contains grape and apple. At various stages of dilution with ice, and at different temperatures, it tastes tea-like, or spiced, or herbal – and unlike anything I’ve tried elsewhere.
How the brand got the name Sosyo, which it has been called since 1957, is another story. That year, it was briefly rechristened Socio, either to support Nehruvian socialism, or because it was considered a social drink. However, its Gujaratis customers mutated Socio into Sosyo, and that’s what stuck. Sosyo did well until the early 1990s – remember the cinema hall ads, ‘Thanda, meetha, Sosyo!’? – until it went into hibernation with the arrival of Coca Cola and Pepsi after Liberalisation. While most other indigenous soft drink companies were either bought over or shut down, Hajoori & Sons continued making Sosyo in small production runs.
Recently, the family has attempted to reinvent the brand, marketing it as a national beverage, with the slogan ‘Apna Desh Apna Drink’, in TV commercials and on Facebook. They now have 11 plants, from which ten per cent of the product is exported, mainly to the US. Last year, cans were introduced, and this year, Abbas Hajoori, the managing director and second generation co-owner, wants to take Sosyo to Africa via Zambia, where they’re planning to set up a plant that (like all other bottling plants) will receive its concentrate but not its secret recipe.
Hajoori remembers delivering an order of ten crates to Mac Ronells in Bandra for a wedding party many years ago. Because he was curious about how they would consume so much of it, he stuck around and found that it was used as the fruity base for a boozy punch. He said his company sells two million crates of 24 200ml bottles annually. From their official website, you can download a PDF of a booklet of recipes for cocktails and mocktails that can be made with Sosyo. For Hajoori, the most imaginative application of the cola was by a hawker – the chap was peddling Sosyo kulfi.
Sosyo is available across the city at shops and cafes including Ideal in Colaba, Britannia in Ballard Estate, Gulshan E Iran in Crawford Market, Good Luck in Bandra and Cafe Marol in Andheri (East).