Why everyone is selling Dubai chocolate bars
The idea for "Dubai chocolate" was first sparked in 2021 by Fix Dessert Chocolatier founder and CEO Sarah Hamouda's pregnancy cravings, she told CNBC. The original chocolate bars are filled with a mixture of pistachio cream, kadayif (shredded phyllo dough) and tahini.
"All I knew in my head is that I wanted to create this chocolate bar that's essentially a dessert encased in chocolate, but looks and feels like a chocolate bar," Hamouda said.
In December 2023, the bars went viral on social media.
"Instead of getting one order every week, we started to get 10, 15 orders," she said. "It was exciting, but it was also like, you know, oh my God, like, how is this happening."
The Fix bars are only available in Dubai and drop twice a day on local delivery service Deliveroo. They're periodically available at Dubai International Airport's Duty-Free shop, which reported that over 1.2 million bars were sold in April, generating $22 million in sales.
Yet, the United Arab Emirates isn't part of the international trademark treaty that would secure protection for the Dubai chocolate name, which makes it easy for any company to make an imitation of the bar.
Chocolate manufacturer Lindt, which posted $6.2 billion in its full fiscal-year 2024 earnings, sold a limited-edition bar in December 2024, and said it's developing a new permanent Dubai chocolate recipe "in response to overwhelming demand."
Shake Shack launched a limited-edition milkshake in April with the flavors. Crumbl is working on a brownie spinoff. Starbucks didn't create an official product, but promoted a customer's idea for a Dubai chocolate-inspired drink, which it later said boosted sales among Gen Z consumers. Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin', which are owned by Inspire Brands, have each launched Dubai chocolate-inspired desserts in other countries like Malaysia and the Netherlands, but wouldn't confirm if they were bringing them to the U.S. markets.
Nuts Factory, a New York City based dried fruit and nuts store, says it was the first company to make a dupe of the bar in the city. It launched in July after testing out different versions in just a couple of days, according to its CEO Din Allall. The bars are made by hand, and it had to impose a one-bar-per-customer limit in stores that summer.
"People just started calling nonstop. We couldn't meet the demand, and we just turned the world upside down to make sure we meet the demand. And I think now we're in good shape," he said.
Allall said the company used to make a "couple hundred" bars per day. Now it makes a "few thousand" daily, as the stores have added more flavors, hired additional workers and bought more machines to meet demand. Nuts Factory has also created other Dubai chocolate-inspired desserts.
So far the trend has lasted for 18 months, and companies are still joining in. Trader Joe's just launched arguably the cheapest Dubai chocolate dupe at $3.99 per bar.
It's too early to track "Dubai chocolate" flavor combinations on restaurant menus, says food service consulting firm Technomic, but chocolate-pistachio flavor combos on restaurant menus were up 22.3% between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the same period in 2024, and increased 5.9% the year prior.
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