Dubai chocolate: a category born on TikTok, and who gets to own it

Fix Dessert Chocolatier is a small company in Dubai founded by Sarah Hamouda and Yezen Alani. Its best-known bar, launched under the name “Can’t Get Knafeh of It”, is thick milk chocolate filled with pistachio cream and toasted kataifi, the shredded pastry used in knafeh. At the end of 2023 a food creator posted a video of herself eating one, and it was watched tens of millions of times. Fix sold only in Dubai, in small batches released at set times through a delivery app, and the bars sold out quickly. Through 2024 the internet gave the product a generic name, “Dubai chocolate”, and home cooks, bakeries and small brands everywhere started making their own.

The large companies followed. Lindt released a Dubai-style bar in small quantities and then more widely, with queues reported in German shops. Discount chains, supermarket private labels and confectioners across Europe and the US launched versions at many price points. In Germany the name itself went to court, with rulings in 2025 on whether “Dubai chocolate” may be used for bars made elsewhere. Demand for pistachio kernels rose at a time when supply was already tight, and trade press in spring 2025 linked the craze to higher pistachio prices.

A category named by someone else

Category design runs in three moves: frame, name, claim. Fix did the hardest part, the product itself, which framed a new idea of a chocolate bar as a dessert you eat on camera. The name came from the audience, and it named a place. A name like that belongs to whoever uses it most. The books list a rule for category names: beware of names that invite giants. “Dubai chocolate” invited every chocolate maker in the world, because it described a recipe anyone could follow and a city nobody owns.

The claim, the systematic occupation of the category, went to the companies with distribution. Within months most people who had tasted a Dubai chocolate had tasted a copy. That is the usual outcome when a category is born on social media: the creator gets the spark and the attention, and the category king, the player who ends up writing the rules and capturing most of the value, is often the one who can put the product on every shelf.

The difficulty was part of the price

The original kept something the copies could not reproduce. A Fix bar was hard to get: you had to be in Dubai, at the right time, on the right app, or pay a reseller a large markup. Part of what people paid for was that difficulty, the proof of having the real one. This is a mild version of what we call Scarcity as the Product: for some goods the value sits in the difficulty of acquiring them, and adding supply deletes that value.

For Fix, staying small protected the meaning of the original, while the market around it grew. For the copies, the logic ran the other way. They sold an available version of a scarce thing, which works for a season and then turns into a pistachio bar on a crowded shelf. The premium pricing many of them launched with depended on the trend more than on the product.

Who paid for the craze

The clearest winners may have been upstream. When a recipe built on one ingredient spreads across a whole industry, the ingredient becomes the scarce good. Pistachio kernel prices rose, and producers of the nut gained bargaining power over chocolate makers who had built limited editions around it. For a brand pricing a trend product, that is a reminder to read the whole value chain: a viral recipe can move margin away from the brand that sells the bar toward the growers who supply its filling.

The craze has cooled in some markets and is still moving in others. The open question is whether Fix can turn the attention into something it owns, such as a name of its own or a ritual tied to Dubai, before the category settles into a flavour.

If your product was named by your customers before you had the chance, what we do starts with deciding which part of the category is yours to claim.