The Story Behind Dubai's Viral Kunafa Chocolate

By now, everyone's had this bar cross their feed at least once — that unmistakable snap, and the pistachio-green kunafa filling spilling out. You already know what it looks like and tastes like. What's actually interesting is where it came from, and how a dessert made in one small Dubai kitchen ended up moving global pistachio prices.

It started with a craving, not a company

The bar was dreamed up in Dubai in 2021 by Sarah Hamouda, a British-Egyptian engineer, during a pregnancy craving she couldn't quite satisfy with anything on the shelf. She started experimenting at home, imagining chocolate, pistachio, tahini, and knafeh together in one bite, and worked with Filipino pastry chef Nouel Catis Omamalin to turn the idea into a proper recipe, while her husband Yezen Alani came on as an equal partner in building the business around it — he's the one credited with the brand's cheeky bar names, including the original "Can't Get Knafeh of It." Omamalin stepped back from the formal partnership before the 2022 launch but stayed on informally as a collaborator.

It launched small: about 25 handmade bars a day out of Fix Dessert Chocolatier, priced around £16 each. For nearly two years, it stayed a Dubai thing.

How it actually spread

Contrary to how it might feel now, this wasn't an overnight explosion — it built in stages, and across more than one platform, the way most food trends actually do these days.

The first big spark was a video posted in December 2023 by a content creator eating the bar in her car — that single clip has racked up well over 100 million views since. It stayed a slow-burn favorite through most of 2024, and then properly exploded around the second half of that year, when it crossed over from just being filmed to being remade: people started recreating it at home and posting the process — including a widely-watched YouTube recreation in an ASMR style that racked up hundreds of thousands of views on its own. From there it moved everywhere — Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and yes, TikTok too, though that's less relevant if you're watching from India, where TikTok's been banned since 2020. If you caught this trend at all, odds are it reached you through Instagram or YouTube rather than TikTok, and that's honestly how most of the world outside a handful of markets experienced it too.

The trend outgrew the original bar

Demand went so far past what one small Dubai kitchen could supply that copycats and inspired versions showed up everywhere, including from big names like Lindt. Pistachio itself felt the impact: prices climbed roughly 35% over about a year as demand for pistachio paste spiked worldwide, and some retailers started rationing how many kilos shoppers could buy in one go. It's a rare, almost funny example of a dessert trend actually moving a raw ingredient market.

Our take on it

We couldn't resist making our own version either, though we did it our way. Instead of a pistachio cream, we roast real pistachios and grind them into a paste with khand (unrefined, less-processed cane sugar), then fold in crispy toasted kunafa — nothing else doing the work. No dairy cream, no shortcuts, just actual pistachios you can taste. We wrap it in our own dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate too, so the whole bar leans less sweet and a lot more like real food. If you've had the original and were curious what a more natural, chocolate-forward version tastes like, that's exactly what we set out to make — you can find our Pista Kunafa bar here.

Sources: Wikipedia, Gulf News, FIX Dessert Chocolatier (global), Rappler, Dairy News, FoodNavigator, and Know Your Meme.