Dubai chocolate, a nutty chocolate made with pistachios and inspired by the Middle Eastern dessert knafeh, is now a worldwide sensation. It’s stocked in supermarkets globally (including Harrods as of June 2026) with similar products produced by chocolate company titans including Cadbury and Lindt. But while the chocolate is now a household name, the product’s creation had humble beginnings.
It’s founders are the Willy Wonkas of the Middle East, married couple Sarah Hamouda and Yezen Alani. The pair first thought-up Dubai chocolate back in 2021 while working their high-flying corporate jobs in Dubai, setting out to create the chocolate bar that would satisfy Hamouda’s pregnancy craving.
While her first pregnancy left her craving carbs, it was Hamouda’s second pregnancy that made her crave a chocolatey knafeh; a Middle Eastern sweet, syrupy dessert often made with pistachio.
Sarah Hamouda and Yezen Alani transformed a pregnancy craving into a global brand.
She says, ‘I’ve always been a dessert person, I think it was just enhanced during my pregnancy. I was craving nostalgia, childhood flavours and certain ingredients.’
Both Hamouda and Alani were in the corporate world before becoming full-time chocolatiers, starting their chocolate brand FIX as a side hustle, making the chocolate in their kitchen and reading up on chocolate-making techniques from blooming to temperature sensitivity.
Alani says, ‘It was just constant learning.’
‘We turned our dining room into a small kitchen,’ explains Hamouda, ‘We relied on word of mouth, did our own finances and would sell at small festivals in the UAE, piggybacking off of friends when we couldn’t afford to actually get into them.’
‘There were times I wanted to give up,’ admits Hamouda; though I can bet she’s glad that they didn’t, with their most recent figures showing sales in the millions.
The knafeh-inspired chocolate is officially named ‘Can’t Get Knafeh Of It’ but was popularly coined Dubai chocolate when the product went viral on social media in 2024 when influencer Maria Vehera posted a video of herself trying the chocolate which received 125M views.
While the couple was initially unsure about Vehera’s video, they now recognise it as a key turning point for their company.
‘I remember first seeing the video and thinking, “I don’t get it, but ok,” Alani admits, ‘Neither of us thought it would go viral.’
But a few weeks after Vehera’s video was posted, they started to get thousands of messages online from people asking how to purchase the chocolate.
‘People from different parts of the world would ask us, “How do we get our hands on this?”,’ reveals Hamouda.
Demand for the chocolate was so high that the couple recruited some friends back in the UK to help them to deal with the influx in interest and demand online.
‘There were times we’d open at 5pm and have sold out before it went 5.01pm,’ says Hamouda, ‘A lot of people didn’t believe us, they thought it was marketing or a PR stunt. We would have queues and queues of drivers coming to pick up their orders.’
Looking back on their 2021 kitchen table operation, Hamouda is humble about the global success their company has now reached. She says, ‘Seeing what it’s created around the world has been amazing. We didn’t expect it to happen.’
The pistachio chocolate is inspired by the Middle Eastern dessert, knafeh.
Five years on, Dubai chocolate has transformed into something far beyond what FIX’s founders could have anticipated.
But, as with any popular item in the 2020s, with great virality comes lots of dupes. FIX’s website instructs ‘Shop the original. Say no to fakes!’, but with the £18 price tag is it really surprising that people are shopping around for a cheaper sweet fix?Chocolate brand Lindt is selling its version of Dubai chocolate for little over half of FIX’s price.
But still, the couple stay positive. Alani says, ‘Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, as cliché as that sounds. For us to create a category is incredible.’
So, what does Dubai in a chocolate bar taste like? It’s a fair question, especially if you want to make sure you’ll enjoy a chocolate bar worth the price of a main meal. The answer: it’s definitely rich, and something you’d probably struggle to binge.
Hamouda says, ‘I wanted it to be a dessert encased in chocolate’. It definitely has the decadence of a high-end dessert (even if this one can be scoffed on your sofa).
And, perhaps more importantly, what does their second daughter (the one whose pregnancy kickstarted the entire phenomenon) think? ‘She’s obsessed,’ Alani says. A good job, she’s got an unlimited lifetime’s supply.
