The Bar That Ate the World's Pistachios
A milk-chocolate bar engineered for the TikTok crack-and-ooze helped drive pistachio prices from about $7.65 to $10.30 a pound and pushed UAE pistachio imports from Iran up 40%. The bakers who never went viral are paying for it.
TL;DR — A viral pistachio-and-knafeh chocolate bar from Dubai sent pistachio prices from ~$7.65 to ~$10.30 a pound and triggered a worldwide nut shortage.
Picture the chain of cause and effect: a phone, a kitchen counter, a knife pressing into a chocolate shell until it gives with a clean snap and a band of green paste spills out. Multiply that fifteen-second clip by a hundred million viewings, and somewhere on the other end a nut trader in London is fielding panicked calls and a small ice-cream maker in California is staring at an invoice that no longer makes sense. That is the strange arc of "Dubai chocolate" — a luxury candy bar that did what wars and weather usually do, and rearranged a global commodity market.
A dessert built for the camera
The original goes by the pun "Can't Get Knafeh Of It," made by Fix Dessert Chocolatier, a company founded in Dubai in 2021 by British-Egyptian entrepreneur Sarah Hamouda and her husband Yezen Alani. It detonated after a December 2023 TikTok video crossed 120 million views, as Compartés recounted. In the UAE alone, more than 1.2 million bars sold in the first three months of 2025.
You could almost reverse-engineer its virality. A thick chocolate wall hiding crisp shredded kataifi pastry and a river of pistachio cream — the snap, the ooze, the impossible green. Once that shot existed, every chocolatier and supermarket on the planet wanted to film their own.
When the kernels ran dry
This is the hinge where a fad turns into an economics lesson. Pistachios were already in short supply, and a sudden global rush for kernels was enough to tip the whole market sideways.
| Pistachio market signal | Change |
|---|---|
| Price per pound | ~$7.65 → ~$10.30 (year-on-year) |
| UAE imports from Iran | +40% (six months to March 2025) |
| US pistachio supply | –20% (12 months to February) |
Those numbers come from FoodNavigator, and the clearest explanation belongs to someone who buys and sells the nut for a living. "There wasn't much in supply, 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," said Giles Hacking of nut trader CG Hacking, per FoodNavigator. The detail that matters is the grade: Dubai chocolate wants peeled, slivered "kernel" pistachios — exactly the premium tier every other dessert kitchen relies on.
The giants pile in
A trend this loud does not stay artisanal for long. Lindt rushed a limited-edition Mediterranean Pistachio bar to market in December 2024; it sold out in 72 minutes on TikTok Shop, Compartés noted. By spring 2025, Crumbl Cookies had a Dubai Chocolate Brownie and a Dubai Chocolate Cheesecake on the menu. FoodNavigator tallied at least a dozen brands hawking their own version — and, predictably, a tide of counterfeit and scam "Dubai chocolate" riding the name.
Why it refused to die
Most viral foods are summer flings; this one signed a lease. Its staying power comes from a combination that rarely coexists: a genuinely premium product rather than a two-dollar gimmick, a built-in luxury-origin narrative, and a texture that simply performs on video. It also spawned a durable aftershock — pistachio-flavored everything — that has outlasted the bar that started it.
The part nobody films is the bill. When a single TikTok trend can move a global crop price by a third, the people left holding the cost are the small bakeries and ice-cream shops that quietly depended on pistachios being cheap. They never went viral. They just pay for the show.
FAQ
What exactly is Dubai chocolate?
A chocolate bar filled with crispy kataifi (kataifi/knafeh) pastry and pistachio cream, originally made by Fix Dessert Chocolatier in Dubai and launched in 2021. It went viral on TikTok in late 2023.
Did Dubai chocolate really cause a pistachio shortage?
It was a major driver. Surging demand for premium kernel pistachios helped push prices from about $7.65 to $10.30 a pound and drove a 40% jump in UAE pistachio imports from Iran, against an already-tight global supply.
How popular did it get?
The launch TikTok video passed 120 million views, more than 1.2 million bars sold in the UAE in early 2025, and Lindt's copycat bar sold out in 72 minutes on TikTok Shop.
Sources: FoodNavigator, Compartés journal, Entrepreneur.
Image: Ionenlaser, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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