A toffee was handed over in Rome. Within hours, it had become a meme; within days, an unrelated company’s stock was soaring. Diplomacy had found an unlikely afterlife.

In 1928, Narottam Chauhan, together with four of his brothers, purchased a factory in Mumbai’s suburb of Vile Parle for ₹75,000; the Chauhan family had until then worked in tailoring in Gujarat. After training in Germany to make candy, Narottam launched the company’s first product, an orange-flavoured confectionery, in 1929, with twelve workers, most of them family members. According to Forbes India, the business struggled at first and only turned its first profit some years later; it was not until the early 2020s, nearly a century on, that it overtook rivals to become India’s biggest food company by revenue. Ninety-seven years after that 1929 launch, one of its sweets became the most talked-about thing in Indian foreign policy for a brief time. Melody, introduced in 1983, was an early product aimed squarely at children, priced low enough for a child to buy it with a single coin.