Dubai chocolate
Dubai chocolate is a style of chocolate bar filled with kadayif and a pistachio-tahini cream. It was created in 2021 by Nouel Catis Omamalin, a Filipino chef, and Sarah Hamouda, a British-Egyptian engineer, after she asked him to prepare a chocolate recipe similar to the sweet dish her mother used to make during her childhood.
Hamouda and her husband are the co-owners of Fix Dessert Chocolatier, an Emirati chocolatier in Dubai. Dubai chocolate was popularized in 2024 by influencers on social media, especially those on TikTok, and has since been imitated by vendors worldwide.
Description
Dubai chocolate is a milk chocolate bar filled with a sweet pistachio-tahini cream and kadayif. The consistency of the filling ranges from finely ground to a paste. The creamy textures of the pistachio and tahini contrasts with the crunch of the kadayif.Creation
Dubai chocolate was first released in 2022 by the Dubai-based online shop Fix Dessert Chocolatier under the name "Can't Get Knafeh of It".Fix Dessert Chocolatier was started as a duo consisting of Sarah Hamouda, a British-Egyptian engineer living in Dubai, and her husband and business partner Yezen Alani. Sarah says she came up with the idea in 2021 when she was pregnant, and through her food cravings came to imagine combining chocolate, pistachio, tahini, and knafeh. In her account, Hamouda worked on developing a bar at home before contacting Nouel Catis Omamalin, a Filipino culinary consultant who had trained as a pastry chef.
In his account of Dubai chocolate's creation, Omamalin said they wanted to create a chocolate bar with the flavour of a dessert. As his favourite Arabic dessert was knafeh, and because he thought it would have an appealing crunch and nostalgic value, Omamalin suggested a chocolate bar using its flavors. Together, they developed the chocolate, forming a partnership and the online shop Fix Dessert Chocolatier, although Omamalin left the partnership before the bar was released.
Can't Get Knafeh contained pistachio, tahini and kadayif, and was covered in yellow and green patterns. Bars were made by hand, the interiors piped; a team working six to eight hours would produce 25 bars a day. Omamalin, who had by the launch left the partnership, kept working with Hamouda, saying he was doing so "as a friend". Over the following year, they continued to modify the recipe, until early 2023 when Hamouda said they had "finally... nailed it". Each bar was sold for £16, initially at a rate of one per week.With a small marketing budget, Fix relied on social media influencers to promote the chocolate, who tasted and reviewed it on camera. The interior's bright colors have been credited with some of the product's success, as the visual appeal created is important on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. It first gained popularity in 2024.
Dubai was viewed as a trendy location among young people, particularly with social media influencers. Bobby Ghosh of TIME magazine concludes the candy as a successful form of gastrodiplomacy due to its "cultural confidence" incorporating ingredients readily available in its home Middle East region, moreso an efficient work of spontaneous soft power than the city's rapid acquisition of foreign fine art and high-rise development which grants it a perceived negative global image laden of shallow opulence.
Expansion
As the product gained popularity, large scale manufacturers such as Lindt began to produce and market them as Dubai Chocolate. In Germany, an importer of a clone of Fix Dubai Chocolate issued a cease-and-desist letter to the manufacturer Lindt, Aldi and Lidl because it was not produced in Dubai. While geographical indications are in principle protectable under the Geneva Act of the Lisbon Agreement, the United Arab Emirates has not signed the agreement. According to most legal scholars, the term "Dubai chocolate" is already a generic trademark in the EU market and does not contain any geographical indication.In January 2025, a German court in Cologne decided that Aldi has to stop selling its product named "Alyan Dubai Handmade Chocolate" on the ground it might mislead consumers that the chocolate has been produced in Dubai while it is actually produced in Turkey. In the UK, the popularity of the Lindt variety of the chocolate was such that the supermarket chain Waitrose imposed purchase limits of two bars per customer.
The popularity of Dubai chocolate has exacerbated the shortage of pistachios worldwide since 2024.