A $20 Chocolate Bar Made in a Living Room Caused a Global Pistachio Shortage. Dubai Just Gave It an Award.

A chocolate bar a pregnant woman dreamed up in her Dubai living room did something most CEOs never pull off. It moved a global commodity market.

Pistachio prices jumped from $7.65 a pound to $10.30 in a year, and U.S. pistachio supplies fell 20%, Confectionery News reported. “There wasn’t much in supply, so when Dubai chocolate comes along…,” nut trader Giles Hacking told the outlet.

On Saturday, Dubai’s crown prince named the bar’s maker, FIX Dessert Chocolatier, the first winner of the new Dubai-it Award for business, and said Dubai-style chocolate sales jumped 1,234% in a single year, The National reported.

The 30-second video that started it

Founders Sarah Hamouda and Yezen Alani were selling “about a bar a week,” Alani told The New York Times. Then a creator named Maria Vehera filmed herself eating their Can’t Get Knafeh of It bar in her car. This is the actual video:

It brought “at least 30,000” orders, Alani said, “which is when the delivery app they were using crashed.”

Then It Got Messy

Lindt copied it. The Swiss giant made a limited run of 300 Dubai-style bars. They sold out in a day, the Times reported.

A German court got involved. In January 2025, a Cologne court ordered Aldi Süd to stop selling a “Dubai chocolate” bar that was actually made in Turkey, ruling that shoppers could be misled, Daily Sabah reported.

Scammers moved in. FIX doesn’t ship outside the region, so fake websites started selling “FIX” bars that don’t exist, Confectionery News reported.

She still won’t mass-produce it. Hamouda turned down offers because “the product wouldn’t be the same,” she told Arabian Business. In Dubai, bars were sold in limited daily drops on Deliveroo and often gone in minutes, CNN reported. She calls FIX “the Hermes bags of chocolate.”

Before Your Next Meeting

Here’s what this means for your business:

• If one customer posted about you tonight, what would break first? FIX went from a bar a week to 30,000 orders and a crashed app. Name the one thing (your site, your phones, your inventory) that would fail, and fix it before you need it.
• What would you refuse to change, even for more money? Hamouda turned down mass production because “the product wouldn’t be the same.” Lindt made its own and stopped at 300 bars. Is there something in your business you’d protect at the cost of growing slower?
• If a bigger company copied you tomorrow, what’s the one thing they couldn’t copy? Hamouda’s answer: “There will always be copycats. But it’s our quality, creativity and precision that makes us different.” Can you answer that in one sentence? If not, that’s your work this quarter.

Sources: The National; Confectionery News; The New York Times via West Hawaii Today; Daily Sabah; Arabian Business; CNN.

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