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fuck Dubai, I hope it all sinks into the desert. actual shithole.
What in God's name are you talking about?
Dubai chocolate is when oil barons rent influencers to literally shit on them, and don’t let them make you forget it.
For starters, does anyone even know about Dubai? Sure it’s a very beautiful-looking city in the Middle East, but the economy is very corrupt. Human trafficking, slavery and whatnot.
That's what I think of when I hear Dubai. It's not aspirational. It's exploitation and ghouls who want to be the boot.
Pretty representative of the chocolate industry too. Beautiful taste, full of corruption and slavery. So I think Dubai & Chocolate is a perfect match made in hell.
I actually found an article a few weeks ago detailing the rise of Dubai chocolate.
Here it is: Dubai Chocolate is Regime Propaganda
The product was created in 2021 by a confectioner named Sarah Hamouda, who took her inspiration from a pregnancy craving for chocolate combined with pistachio and enlisted the Filipino chef Nouel Catis Omamalin to concoct the recipe.
Really, though, “created” is a strong word, since people across the Middle East have been making pistachio sweets for centuries, so “popularized” would be closer to the mark. Initially, the product wasn’t called “Dubai chocolate” at all, but the clunkier and more annoying name “Can’t Get Knafeh Of It,” after the “knafeh” filling.
Hamouda’s company did business in Dubai in relative obscurity until 2023, when an influencer named Maria Vehera—whose content revolves around trying different foods and restaurants in the United Arab Emirates—went viral with a TikTok video about the candy. Other influencers copied Vehera, as they do, and before long Dubai chocolate was a full-blown fad.
Seems to be a natural occurring fad.
I unironically like the original name more. It has a nice Bob's Burgers vibe to it.
Knafehlate for short?
Dub[a]ious Chocolate
Wasn’t there a rumor that rich dudes were paying girls to shit on their chest and calling it Dubai chocolate?
It was an article but yes
First heard of it in connection to food poisoning and deaths. Never tried it, never will
Edible fidget spinners
Nailed it
This is the first I've heard of it.
They sell it at most stores where I live in the American Midwest. Even Aldi carries it.
Anywhere even remotely advertising itself as "high end" will have tons of shit like this. I visited my family in SoCal earlier this year and every time we went to the local farmers market there were like 3-5 booths that had some kind of "Dubai chocolate" something. And at literally every retail store in SoCal, you'll find multiple different brands of Dubai chocolate. It's fucking everywhere.
They sell them in the checkout lines in Publix grocery stores.
Walmart sells a Dubai chocolate cake, and it is wonderful.
Who is hating on this? I mean yeah Walmart bad and all that. But that cake is fuego!
Those that think I’m a plant? Lol
My PsyOp is working!
Great Value™ brand items stimulate the American economy much more than so-called “local” “employee owned” products. Arkansas is a model for the rest of the country!
I mean, it is really yummy. Just avoid the stuff that's branded.
The top “you buy, we fry” chicken spot sells their own house made Dubai chocolate. Fucking fire.
But also, fuck Dubai. Not sure how this food is propaganda. Just don’t give money that supports the regime?
it serves the same purpose as quirky 4chan screenshots: attempts to soften the image of a horrible place.
Does it really though? This sounds a lot like when people assign meaning to things that are simply as they appear. 9/10 people in the US don’t care about Dubai to begin with, let alone the slavery and other human rights abuses. They may have seen the vapid influencers that show off penthouse suites at staggering heights, or the $10k+ plane tickets, and go “alrighty then, anyways”.
9/10 people in the US don’t care about Dubai to begin with, let alone the slavery and other human rights abuses. They may have seen the vapid influencers that show off penthouse suites at staggering heights, or the $10k+ plane tickets, and go “alrighty then, anyways”.
I think that is the whole point: To keep the image of Dubai up as the land of luxury. If Dubai is just some place where the world's favorite influencers party, then an indifferent foreigner isn't going to look closer for any human rights problems, etc. "Sure, I've heard of Dubai. They make chocolate, right?" is better for the rulers than "Sure, I've heard of Dubai. They still have slaves, right?".
Put another way: If most of the world doesn't care about Dubai, then people are only going to know what the current culture tells them about it. Chocolate and Lamborghinis is a simpler story to keep in the culture than human rights abuses.
I mean Fresno, CA is the home of the US pistachio something something. I think they grow a lot of pistachios there maybe. I call it Fresno chocolate because fuck Dubai.
I can reserve my "fuck Fresno" for better occasions. It's nowhere near as big as my "fuck Dubai" or "fuck Lodi"
I see your point. I still doubt that Dubai chocolate has given Dubai a positive image on the world stage.
The coverage of their use of slaves to build the stadiums for the World Cup was pretty wide, and yet very few boycotted the games or FIFA for paying the slavers.
Though I suppose that may prove your point. I just don’t see how something that most people don’t even know about is some propaganda campaign.
Have you ever heard of soft power? Countries like the US, China, and Russia, even Thailand from what I know, engage in these deliberate propaganda campaigns. It's like the only reason they keep the Olympics around when it's such a money drain. It's also why Hollywood has gotten so much funding from the US government over the decades.
The UAE doesn't have to sit in a room and explicitly plan it out when they can just pay hundreds of influencers to do the work for them. You're not meant to notice that it subtly normalizes and legitimizes the country in the world stage.
Not saying that it necessarily is, just that its roots seem kinda shady
I suspect this might be over thinking it a little. You know those cheap Asian products that have mashup of western pop culture like "Obama - Gotta go fast!" on a picture of Frank Zappa, it is a way of using another culture as a means to grab clout.
So someone made a decent chocolate but with expensive ingredients, so why not name it after the pinnacle of hedonistic hubris. It has nothing to do with Dubai other than 'Dubai = fancy". They have certainly jumped on after the fact like an influencer who accidentally made it big, but it didn't feel like an industry plant from the beginning.
That said, this fad will pass and you will be able to buy pistachios really cheap afterwards as there will be a glut of them.
There's a local coffee shop that makes it and it's actually pretty good
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2026
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