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How Dubai Chocolate Became the Prada Bag of the Candy Aisle

  • Writer: Vicenta Wheatley
    Vicenta Wheatley
  • Sep 16
  • 3 min read

What makes one chocolate bar worth a few dollars and another worth twenty? It’s not the cocoa. It’s not even the pistachio cream. It’s the story wrapped around it. Dubai chocolate, once a niche souvenir tucked into airport bags, has been transformed by TikTok into a global microtrend—a sweet that sells itself less on flavor and more on prestige. Much like a Prada bag, its appeal lies not in necessity but in what it communicates: luxury and exclusivity. In that sense, Dubai chocolate demonstrates how easily luxury can be manufactured, how something as simple as candy can become couture.



Scarcity as a strategy


One of the strongest forces behind the popularity of the Dubai chocolate craze is the careful engineering of scarcity. It began in 2022 when FIX Dessert Chocolatier, a Dubai-based brand ,  marketed its new pistachio flavoured bars as luxury items: elegantly packaged, draped in gold foil, and positioned as a treat you could only get from Dubai itself. At first, this exclusivity made them feel like souvenirs of status, the kind of thing you could only pick up in Dubai, like an airport exclusive that whispered opulence. But once TikTok caught wind of it, “Dubai chocolate” stopped being tied to a single chocolatier and morphed into a trend of its own. Shops around the world have rushed to put their own spin on it, selling “Dubai chocolate” flavoured pancakes, perfumes, and…vapes? The irony here of course, is that the more places started using the name “Dubai chocolate”, the less rare and exclusive it became. Yet, its marketing and image still clung to the luxurious allure and glamour of Dubai. 



Utility in Consumption 


Biting into Dubai chocolate isn’t just about flavor,  it’s about the fleeting thrill of luxury condensed into a single square. In economics, utility refers to the benefits (like happiness or satisfaction) consumers get from a good. Dubai chocolate provides what economists would call immediate consumption utility: it delivers a quick burst of pleasure through taste, novelty, and presentation. But because it’s a consumable, the utility is short-lived, once you’ve eaten the chocolate, it’s gone. Worse still, the law of diminishing marginal utility kicks in: that first luxurious bite might feel heavenly, but by the fourth or fifth, the satisfaction curve starts to flatten. But Dubai chocolate has found a way to stretch its value beyond the palate. In an age where consumption is content, the chocolate’s true utility lies as much in the social act as the sensory one, getting displayed, documented, and shared on social media.  In this sense, the chocolate functions less as food and more as a cultural artifact — its utility rooted as much in the performance of ownership as in the eating.


Signalling and Status

Beyond its direct utility, Dubai chocolate gains much of its value from status signalling. In economics, signalling theory explains how consumers use goods to convey information about themselves that is not immediately observable, such as wealth, taste, or cultural awareness. Dubai chocolate functions as a form of conspicuous consumption: the gold packaging and the association with Dubai transform an ordinary bar of chocolate into a public display of affluence. The good itself is perishable, but the act of purchasing and posting it online communicates social standing. Even if the pleasure of eating the chocolate fades quickly, the signal it sends—“I can afford luxury, even in something as trivial as dessert”—creates additional value.


In today’s consumer world, even a piece of chocolate can become a status symbol, something that may not be inherently valuable, but instead carefully crafted by social and cultural mechanisms.


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