I stand in my local Lidl, staring gloomily at the chocolate bars. The man beside me seems similarly disappointed. “Are you looking for the Dubai chocolate?” he asks. It might be kept behind the till, I say, given how precious and popular it is. He stops the security guard and she looks at us sympathetically. No chance, she says. They sold out in hours.
If you don’t spend your life on TikTok, the latest viral food trend may have passed you by. But you won’t escape it for long. “Dubai chocolate” has gone mainstream.
The bars were first invented in 2021 by Sarah Hamouda, a British-Egyptian living in Dubai. When she was pregnant with her second child, her cravings inspired her to come up with a chocolate bar containing a sweet, gooey filling of pistachio cream and tahini with the crunch of knafeh, a traditional Middle Eastern dessert made from shredded filo, soft cheese and syrup.
Hamouda was an engineer, not a chocolatier. “That one craving sparked a passion I never expected,” she says. “I threw myself into learning everything I could, and along the way, I had the privilege of working with some truly amazing people who helped bring this dream to life. I never imagined Dubai chocolate would become such a global craze. Seeing it resonate globally has been surreal and deeply rewarding.”
Craze is certainly the word. When Lidl launched its own version of Dubai chocolate at the end of March, there were reports of people queueing before stores opened. It sold out within hours, despite the £4.99 bars being limited to two per person. The chocolate brand Lindt launched its version at the end of last year – the £10 price tag hasn’t put off the shoppers at my local Sainsbury’s, where it was out of stock. When it launched in Waitrose in March, a two-bar-per-customer limit was imposed there as well.
Upmarket chocolatiers have created their own versions. Maison Samadi, which has a shop in west London, sells a “Dubai viral chocolate” bar for £15.75. Budget retailers are stocking it, too. Home Bargains sells Dubites, a bag of bite-size morsels, and Aldi is about to launch its Dubai-style chocolate ice-cream.
As I trawl my local shops and supermarkets – including Morrisons, which sells a £5 bar from the brand Bolci – it’s out of stock everywhere. If I wasn’t so exhausted by the search, I could create my own; Brooklyn Beckham is one of many social media users to post a video of themselves doing just that. Eventually I find a small bar – for £5.99! – at a garage shop, from a brand I’ve never heard of. It is wrapped in gold foil. I feel like Charlie Bucket winning a golden ticket.
There are numerous imitations of Dubai chocolate for sale online, with at least one site accepting cryptocurrency as payment for what it claims is the original Fix Dessert Chocolatier bar, created by Hamouda. Last year, Fix, which only sells its chocolate through the food delivery app Deliveroo, and only in the United Arab Emirates, warned of “scammers”.
At the end of last year, the German food authority raised food safety concerns about less-than-scrupulous manufacturers and importers, after a random small sample of Dubai chocolate bars found harmful mould toxins and undeclared sesame, an allergy risk.
Social media is the reason for the confectionery’s rapid rise. Hamouda created her chocolate bar with the help of chef Nouel Catis Omamalin, a trained pastry chef turned culinary consultant living in Dubai. “So many versions were created I lost count,” says Hamouda. “We kept refining, tweaking and testing, never settling. Even after we launched, we continued to improve the recipes because we knew they could be better. I’d say we finally nailed it by early 2023.” Sweet, creamy, crunchy, with a chocolate shell decorated with splashes of colour and a whimsical name (Can’t Get Knafeh of It), the finished product must have seemed like a winner.
Even so, when she began selling it through her online shop, it wasn’t an instant success. So she tried sending bars to local influencers. One of them was Maria Vehera, who posts ecstatic videos of herself trying delicious new treats in her car. The video of her trying Dubai chocolate went viral in December 2023 and has now had more than 122m views. In an interview with the New York Times this year, Hamouda said her company received more than 30,000 orders after Vehera’s video went up. Although Hamouda’s product is still only available in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, it topped Deliveroo’s global table of most popular orders last year, and still sells out quickly.
Like the rapturous Vehera, I greedily unwrapped my Dubai chocolate bar in the car – although sitting in a grubby 13-year-old family estate gobbling up petrol station chocolate isn’t quite the same vibe. I will eat all chocolate, from 90% cacao artisan bars to the trashiest kind, so I’m perhaps not the best judge, but the Dubai chocolate was delicious. This version was too sweet to detect the pistachio, beyond its suspiciously bright green colour, but the creamy-meets-crunchy texture was new and delightful.
Alon Chen, chief executive of food trend analysts Tastewise, says his system flagged “Dubai chocolate” as a trend in January 2024. Tastewise’s technology monitors menus from restaurants in the UK, the US and nine other countries. “Restaurateurs or restaurants are the biggest innovation lab in the world,” he says. “If you know what’s happening there, you can see the trends.” Think of the rainbow bagel that came out of the Bagel Store in Brooklyn, or the cronut (croissant-donut hybrid) created in 2013 by French pastry chef Dominique Ansel.
Tastewise also keeps an eye on blogs about what people are cooking at home (which recipes are published, and which ones are popular), and social media. By the time a product reaches the shelves of a supermarket, the trend will already be 12 to 18 months old.
Nobody specifically predicted the rise of “Dubai chocolate”, says Chen, but there were other signs that the world was ready for it. In the west, there has been growing interest in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food for a while. “And the explosion of pistachio was everywhere. So would Dubai chocolate have exploded if it wasn’t with the tailwind of the pistachio prevalence? Probably not.” It was three years ago that his company flagged the growing popularity of the pistachio-and-chocolate combination, he adds. Middle Eastern flavours are also becoming more fashionable in sweet treats – other trends he predicts include the rise of date syrup and tahini.
Middle Eastern chocolate has not traditionally been renowned around the world, says Chloé Doutre-Roussel, former chocolate buyer at Fortnum & Mason, and author of The Chocolate Connoisseur. Even in places such as the United Arab Emirates, prestige international brands are traditionally more popular than local chocolate products. It was at the Salon du Chocolat last autumn in Paris, a trade show for the chocolate industry, that Doutre-Roussel first noticed the pistachio-filled treat.
The trend has largely been driven by marketing, she says – “the social media, the colourful packaging” – but also by Dubai chocolate’s broad appeal. “People prefer filled chocolates – these bars with a thick filling and very sweet. It’s very indulgent. People love it, but this is not chocolate – it is confectionery, flattened to take the shape of a bar.” Even with bars of chocolate, she adds, “If you look at consumers’ behaviour, most of the time they prefer flavoured chocolate.”
Doutre-Roussel likens the world of chocolate to coffee: to connoisseurs, an unadulterated specialty coffee is a thing of beauty. For the rest of us, it has to be made more palatable with frothy milk or – horror! – flavoured syrups. In chocolate, people “prefer something with orange, cinnamon or fancy flavours like wasabi”, she says, “and are not used to looking for the wonderful aromas behind quality cacao”. With Dubai chocolate, it’s for people “who want easy, fast pleasure – sweet and fat – but not necessarily elegant”.
Will the trend continue? That’s what retailers want to know, and what Chen is monitoring. The growing number of knock-off versions suggests it will. “Copycats are inevitable and honestly, it’s a compliment,” says Hamouda, who adds she is cheered by smaller chocolate producers and home cooks creating their own versions. Although in the past she has seemed frustrated by big companies jumping in, she says that “when century-old chocolate giants begin replicating your flavour, that’s when you know you’ve made an impact”. Dubai chocolate is apparently better suited to the small producers; Fix still only makes a limited number of bars each day, though Hamouda says it is scaling up production to meet demand, and “expanding beyond the UAE is absolutely part of the plan, including to places like the UK”. The hype is partly caused by scarcity, but there is a good reason for the shortage.
“The interesting thing with Dubai chocolate is the food science part,” says Chen. “Dubai chocolate cannot be made at large scale. Why? Because the knafeh is very crispy and fragile, and it takes a lot of technology on a large production line to be able to cover the knafeh and add the cream, and still keep the crunchiness. Without the crunchiness, it’s just another pistachio-flavoured chocolate bar.” Manufacturers have figured out how to make mass-market products that have some of the same qualities – think of the creamy fillings and crunchy wafer middles of Kinder Bueno and Ferrero Rocher – but a lot of time and expense will have been spent developing those. Dubai chocolate could go totally mainstream, says Chen – “it’s just going to take longer.”
He suspects the trend is here to stay. Food trends begin with a consumer need, he says: people like to try new things, but that’s not enough on its own. “For a trend to start, it needs to address something more basic, such as: ‘I want to be healthier, I want more energy, I want something indulgent.’ You’re going deeper into the human motivation.”
Dubai chocolate hits the indulgence craving, he says. “It has flavourful nuts, different textures, the creaminess, the crunchiness, which is something people really like.” The fact that it has cut across all demographics – ages, genders, and different socioeconomic groups, as suggested by it being stocked in both Lidl and Waitrose – is another clue to its possible longevity.
Nobody is apparently safe from the temptation of Dubai chocolate, and Chen suspects it won’t be long before other audiences are targeted. “I’m waiting for the high-protein version,” he says.
