Dubai chocolate
Chez Pierre blog · September 2026.
1,200,000 chocolate bars.
In 30 days. At one airport.
How one chocolate bar moved the world market - and ended up in perfume.
A duty-free shop at Dubai airport published a number that reads like a typo.
In a single month they sold more than 1.2 million bars of one chocolate - and made 22 million dollars on it.
It is, of course, the dubai chocolate - the green one, with pistachio cream and crisp kadayif strands.
The story in 5 facts
🖤It started as a pregnancy craving.+
Dubai chocolate was created in 2021 by Sarah Hamouda, an engineer from Dubai - during her pregnancy, because she could not find anywhere what she was craving. So she made it herself.
⏰It is sold 2 hours a day.+
The original can still only be bought in the Emirates - and only in a window of two hours a day. Everything else is an imitation.
💸It resells for 100+ euros.+
A bar that costs about 10 euros in the shop reaches over 100 on eBay. For one. Chocolate bar.
🥜„The world's pistachio stocks are gone."+
This is not a tabloid headline - it is a quote from a London nut trader for the Financial Times. The price of pistachios jumped 35% in one year, and Iran increased exports to the Emirates by 40%.
🌍Everyone jumped in.+
A Swiss chocolate giant made its own version after the first 1,000 bars sold out the same day - and has sold more than 2.2 million since. Copies are being made on every continent, all over the world.
And then the story went where nobody expected
Because when millions of people spend months looking at, buying and dreaming about one taste - the brain starts to read it as something luxurious. Desirable. Expensive.
And the perfume industry has a whole genre for that: gourmand perfumes.
Scents built on „edible" notes - vanilla, caramel, coffee, almond, cherry. On skin they do not smell like dessert, they smell like warmth and comfort.
that is how much searches for perfumes with a pistachio note jumped
Our gourmands
We still do not have a perfume with a pistachio note. (Yet. 👀) If you want to smell one, write to us!
But we have been making gourmand perfumes since day one - here are my favorites:
One last thing 🖤
This whole story taught me one thing: value is a strange game.
The same chocolate bar is worth 10 euros in a shop and 100 euros online - only because everyone wants it. The same scent is worth 200 euros with a famous logo, or a tenth of that without one.
So I will stick to my line: pay for the scent, not the hype.
SEE THE WHOLE COLLECTIONWith love,
Anja 🧡