Unlock the publisher's digest free
Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The dazzling climb of Dubai chocolate sparked a global crunch of the pistachio offer, exacerbating a global shortage of the green nut and sending its soaring prices.
The bars, a wedding of pistachio cream, grated pastry and milk chocolate, were a modest success after their launch in 2021 by the Emirati Chocolatier store – until a Tiktok video transformed them into global sensation.
The clip, published in December 2023, accumulated more than 120 million views and fueled a global craze for pistachio chocolate, generating a multitude of routes.
Due to the craze, the prices of the pistachio core increased from $ 7.65 per book about $ 10.30 per book now, said Giles Pirage de Nut Trader CG Hacking. “The pistachio world is mainly exploited at the moment,” he said.
Chocolate is not cheap. Lindt's Dubai offers at £ 10 for 145 grams in the United Kingdom, more than double of its other bars. But consumers are so passionate that some stores limit the number of bars that each customer can buy, while Lindt and the British supermarket WM Morrison have launched Easter eggs with pistachio cream.
Pistachio stocks were already decreasing after a disappointing harvest last year in the United States, the main exporter of Nut. The American harvest was also of better quality than usual, leaving fewer cheap nuclei without shells which are generally sold as ingredients for chocolate and other foods, said hacking.
“There was not much to supply, so when Dubai Chocolate arrives, and (the chocolate makers) buy all the nuclei on which they are getting their hands … This leaves the rest of the world,” said Hacking.
Iran, the second world producer, exported 40% additional water pistachios over the six months until March 2025 only over the 12 months before that, according to the Iranian customs office.
The shortage marks a lively reversal of 2023 when the global pistachio supply exceeded the demand and caused a drop in prices, said Behrooz Agah, member of the board of directors of Iran's Pistachio Association.
Because of this overabundance, “a variety of by-products have become available such as pistachio butter, oil and dough, which could be used in a wide range of pistachio-based foods,” he said. “It was roughly at the same time that Dubai Chocolate was launched and gradually became viral worldwide.”
In California, some farmers have started to spend almonds to pistachios in recent years due to the large part of the low almond prices, but these trees will not start to produce before the harvest of next season in September.
In the meantime, chocolate makers say that they cannot produce enough bars filled with cream.
“We have the impression that it came out of nowhere, and suddenly, you see it in each corner store,” said Charles Jandreau, managing director of Prestat Group, owner of chocolate brands in the United Kingdom of luxury.
“No one is ready for that,” he said, describing his difficulties in obtaining KataiFi, the paste of the Middle East shredded used in the cream.
Chocolate enthusiasts were already suffering from a crunch of cocoa supply, which led prices to triple in 2024 while weather conditions and extreme diseases have reached harvests. The producers have sold smaller bars with new recipes that scene on cocoa.
Fix, who named his original viral bar “cannot have Kafeh” after a traditional Arab desert, said that even if it was “incredible” to see how the company had inspired “a movement in chocolate”, they feared that others exploit their brand to induce compensation customers. The company does not sell its bars outside the water and only sells them for two hours a day.
His rivals are not discouraged.
We are “just overwhelmed by Dubai chocolate demand,” said Johannes Läderach, managing director of Swiss Chocolatier Läderach. “We launched them a few months ago, and it simply does not stop, it only crosses the roof.”
