Dubai Chocolate History: Who Invented It and How It Went Viral

Ask who invented Dubai chocolate and you get a company name, Fix Dessert Chocolatier, and usually nothing else. The dates matter more than the name. The bar existed for about two years before anyone outside Dubai cared, the company that made it never sold it in a shop during the boom, and the thing that spread worldwide was a category rather than a product. This page sets out the record with a date and a source on every line.

The short answer

Fix Dessert Chocolatier, founded in Dubai in 2021 by Sarah Hamouda and Yezen Alani, made the original. Hamouda is British-Egyptian and moved from London to Dubai with Alani in 2015; she has said the idea started with a pregnancy craving. The chef who built the bar was Nouel Catis Omamalin, a Filipino chocolatier who partnered with Hamouda in 2021 and fused knafeh with chocolate to make Can't Get Knafeh of It: milk chocolate, pistachio cream, toasted kataifi and tahini. He told Arab News he was no longer a partner when the bars went on sale, but stayed on to finish the product.

The bars reached customers in 2022. Nothing much happened for a year. Then, in December 2023, a UAE-based food influencer named Maria Vehera filmed herself eating one in her car, and the video did what the product could not: it traveled.

The timeline

Compiled on 17 August 2026 from published reporting, one source per entry, and downloadable as a CSV file, free to reuse with attribution (see citing this page).

Why it took two years to go viral

The bar was finished long before it was famous. Fix opened in 2021, sold from 2022, and the reporting that eventually described it as a phenomenon dates the virality to early 2024. Nothing about the recipe changed in between.

What changed was the format of the evidence. Dubai chocolate is a texture argument: the snap of the shell, then the sandy crunch of buttered kataifi under it. That is very hard to convey in a photograph and almost self-explanatory in an ASMR video with the sound on. Monique Naval, a senior research analyst at Euromonitor, put Fix's growth down to social media plus deliberate scarcity, telling FoodNavigator that its limited production "indicates exclusivity". Both halves were true at once: a product engineered for one sense that video happens to carry, sold in quantities that guaranteed most people would fail to buy it.

Almost nobody has eaten the original

This is the part the coverage tends to skip. At the height of the wave in August 2024, Fix was making about 500 bars a day, selling them on Deliveroo, in Dubai, in ordering windows that ran from 2pm to 5pm. A bar was Dh68.25, about $20 for 200 g. Fix told FoodNavigator plainly: "We don't currently offer international shipping or retail outside the region."

So the supply of genuine Dubai chocolate to the rest of the world in 2024 was zero, while demand was measured in hundreds of millions of video views. Everything downstream follows from that gap. Resellers in Singapore listed bars at SGD59, about $43. German buyers queued overnight for a Lindt tribute, resold €15 bars for close to €100, and pushed eBay listings to €300. Customs caught a man carrying 45 kg over the Swiss border. Within a year the shelf version outsold everything: Lidl was moving 72 bars a minute, and Lindt went on to sell 2.2 million tablets and make Dubai Style its best-selling travel-retail line.

The category grew by being copied. That is not a criticism of the copies, several of which are good, and our own Dubai chocolate recipe is one more. It does mean that when people argue about whether Dubai chocolate is overrated, most of them are arguing about a different bar.

What it did to pistachios

Confectionery demand hit a nut that was already tight. Kernel prices went from about €6.65 a pound in 2024 to €8.96 in 2025, near enough 35% by our arithmetic on those two published figures. US supplies fell 20% in the 12 months to February 2025. Iranian exports to the UAE rose 40% in the six months to March 2025 against the whole of 2024. Giles Hacking of the nut trader CG Hacking summed up the mechanism: supply was thin already, "so when Dubai chocolate comes along, and chocolatiers are buying up all the kernels they can get their hands on, that leaves the rest of the world short."

Keep that separate from what happened in 2026, because the cause is different. This year's problem is a crop failure: record March heat during an unusually early bloom left pistachio flowers unfertilized, and California's crop is now estimated at around 800 million pounds against 1.58 billion in 2025. Demand did not cause that. We track the official USDA and BLS figures behind both stories on the US pistachio price tracker, and the longer answer to why pistachios are expensive covers the structural reasons that predate any of this.

When the name became a legal question

By late 2024 supermarkets across Europe were selling bars labeled "Dubai chocolate" that had never been near Dubai, and German courts were asked whether that was allowed. The answer took two rounds. The Cologne Regional Court ruled against Aldi Süd twice, on 20 December 2024 and 6 January 2025, holding the term to be an indication of geographical origin. The Frankfurt Regional Court then went the other way in a Lidl case, treating "Dubai" as generic.

The Cologne Higher Regional Court settled it on 27 June 2025, in four parallel cases under 6 U 52/25: "Dubai chocolate" is a geographical indication under section 126(1) of the German Trade Mark Act and has not become a generic term, so the product must be made or substantially processed in Dubai to use the name. The court added that packaging cues such as a Dubai skyline strengthen the impression, and that printing "Product of Türkiye" on the back does not undo it.

That is German law, so it governs the German market rather than the American one. The practical reading for a shopper anywhere is that the phrase describes a style, and the phrase on a wrapper tells you nothing about where the chocolate was made unless the wrapper says so.

The counterfeits, and why they matter more than the knock-offs

A knock-off is a company making its own pistachio and kataifi bar under its own name. A counterfeit is somebody putting a premium wrapper on a cheap bar. The second kind turned into a safety problem. In September 2025 the UK Food Standards Agency issued an alert over fake Le Damas chocolates that contained peanuts with no allergen warning. The legitimate UK distributor, which said it had sold 100,000 genuine bars over 10 months, described being undercut by people who "decided to put profit over the public's health". The confectionery expert Andy Baxendale described the method: buy bars at around 50p, rewrap them, sell at £10 and up.

If you have a nut allergy, the lesson is specific. A viral product with a huge price gap between the real thing and the fake attracts exactly this, and an unfamiliar wrapper is where the allergen labeling fails first.

Where the trend stands in 2026

Fix now sells in places you can walk into: two stores at Dubai International Airport, one at Changi in Singapore, and a concession at Harrods, with 10 bars in the collection. Alani's line about the category, given to The National in July 2026, is the honest summary of what happened: "The world named it Dubai chocolate."

The industry has moved from bars into everything else. Mars put Galaxy Pistachio Kunafa into the UAE and Qatar in four months. Hershey ran a limited US bar in December 2025. Lindt extended Dubai Style into ice cream in July 2026. The flavor combination has outlived the news cycle that made it, which is roughly what happened to salted caramel, and the constraint on it now is the pistachio supply rather than the appetite.

Methodology and limits

Every entry above comes from a named publication with a publication date, and the source list below says which figure came from which article. Where two sources gave different numbers for the same thing we kept both and dated them, which is why the view count appears four times rather than once.

Three limits worth stating. First, we did not independently verify the TikTok view counts or the posting date; those are as published by Khaleej Times, The National, FoodNavigator and Gulf News on the dates shown. Second, there is a small conflict in the founding dates: The National puts the launch at 2021, while Arab News reports that the bars went on sale in 2022. Both can hold if 2021 is the founding and 2022 the first sale, and we have written it that way, flagged here rather than smoothed over. Third, the 35% kernel price rise is our own arithmetic on the two figures FoodNavigator published, not a figure it reported.

The company figures are as published and are not audited. This page is not affiliated with Fix Dessert Chocolatier, Lindt, Mars or Hershey.

Citing this page

You are welcome to cite or republish this timeline and its CSV, including commercially, with attribution to pistachiomilk.org and a link here (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0). Where a row credits another publication, cite that publication for the underlying fact; what this page adds is the compilation and the dating. Suggested citation:

Ricci, E. (2026). Dubai Chocolate History: Who Invented It and How It Went Viral. pistachiomilk.org. https://pistachiomilk.org/dubai-chocolate-history/

Version history: v1.0, 17 August 2026. Timeline compiled from 16 published sources, 2024 to 2026. Corrections welcome via the about page.

Allergy note

Pistachios are a tree nut, and every product named on this page is a pistachio product. The bars also typically contain wheat (kataifi), dairy and sesame (tahini). The counterfeit case above involved undeclared peanuts, so check the wrapper on anything bought from an unfamiliar seller.