Dubai Chocolate Is Now a Grocery Aisle Category

The shape of this trend is unusual. Most viral foods stay hard to buy, which is part of why they stay viral. Dubai chocolate did the opposite: the scarcity was resolved by the industry, and quickly.

ConfectioneryNews traces the commercial turn to travel retail. Lindt launched its Dubai Style bar at Zurich airport in December 2024 with Avolta, added Geneva, and had it in more than 100 airports by the middle of 2025, where it became the company's top-selling line in the first half of that year. Lindt's head of global travel retail, Peter Zehnder, described the starting point as small: "We made 1,000 bars and they sold out in no time in our German store. Then we did it again in Switzerland. And the whole story starts."

By November 2025, ConfectioneryNews reports, that had become 2.2 million tablets sold.

Hershey's entry, reported by Food Dive on December 2, 2025, is a useful marker of where the trend had got to. The company put pistachio filling and kadayif pastry into its break-apart bar format and released 10,000 of them from December 4, through Gopuff in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago and in person at Hershey's Chocolate World in Times Square.

Ten thousand bars is not a distribution strategy. Megan Pantalone, senior manager of innovation at Hershey, told Food Dive: "When something takes over social media like this, we knew it deserved a one-of-a-kind release." Chief customer officer Tiffany Menyhart framed it in category terms instead, saying "the filled bar platform globally is on the rise."

Those two quotes describe two different things. One is a social media moment; the other is a permanent shelf position. The second is what 2026 has looked like.

The clearest sign a viral food has become a category is when it stops being a bar. In July 2026 Lindt launched a limited-edition Dubai Style Sundae in its UK stores, combining Crema Gelata ice cream with kadayif pastry, pistachio sauce and a praline topping. ConfectioneryNews reports the flavour extending into bakery, desserts and drinks more broadly, and notes similar diversification moves from Mars, Ferrero and Mondelēz.

Miquetta de Castro, master chocolatier at Lindt & Sprüngli UK, framed the sundae around the season rather than the trend: "With temperatures soaring this summer, we're excited for chocolate fans to explore our freshly made ice creams and milkshakes only in Lindt stores."

That is worth reading carefully. The sundae is in Lindt stores in the UK only, and no company cited here has announced a permanent US grocery version of a Dubai-style ice cream. The bars are widely available; the frozen versions are not yet.

The most repeated claim about this trend is that it caused a global pistachio shortage. Experts interviewed by Fruitnet in April 2025 disputed it, and the production figures are the reason.

Global in-shell pistachio production reached 1.16m tonnes in 2024/25, against a ten-year average of about 750,000 tonnes — the highest in a decade. Turkey produced 465,000 tonnes, up from 275,000 the season before, and Iran was up roughly 22%, with exports to late January running 80% above the prior year. California's crop, at around 500,000 tonnes, was below recent years, but Fruitnet attributes that to the alternate bearing cycle pistachio trees naturally run on rather than to demand.

Darren Cheshire, a UK nuts and dried fruit buyer, called the shortage narrative "just a red herring." Vittoria Calcagni of Besana argued the Dubai chocolate effect had been exaggerated. Prices did rise; the experts attribute that to several years of pistachio promotion, with Dubai chocolate amplifying momentum that already existed rather than creating it.

If you want a food where the supply story is real, matcha is the one.

Peaking is not the same as over. What the sources here establish is that attention has plateaued while distribution has widened, which is the normal ending for a viral food that the industry decides to keep: the flavour stops being an event and becomes an option, sitting on the shelf next to mint and orange.

None of the sources cited here forecasts a decline, and this page does not either. The signals worth watching are whether any manufacturer converts a Dubai-style product from limited edition to permanent range, and whether the format keeps moving into new categories after ice cream. Both are dated, checkable events rather than opinions, and this page will be updated when one happens.