Dubai chocolate is the golden ticket of city branding

If you were lucky enough to travel over the Eid break, one ubiquitous confection may have caught your eye: Dubai chocolate. No matter where you are in the world, it seems, you just can’t escape it.

For the past few months, wherever I have got off a plane, this bar filled with pistachio, tahini and knafeh spun pastry has arrived before me.

Dubai chocolate may sound like a calculated branding exercise to promote the city, but it’s not. It’s an organic phenomenon that can boast the rarest of marketing ideals: an authentic backstory. 

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for its inventor, Sarah Hamouda, who created the sweet when she was pregnant with her second child. The chocolate company she founded, Fix, can boast the original recipe, which it sells only through a local delivery service. But it is outsold many times over by hordes of imitators selling their own version.

These include big-name chocolatiers such as Swiss confectionery giant Lindt, which offers a 145g bar of “Dubai Style Chocolate” for £10 in the UK.

Fix’s original wasn’t even called Dubai chocolate. It was packaged as the painfully punned Can’t Get Knafeh Of It.

Hamouda’s loss is Dubai’s gain, though. The city is now becoming associated with rich comfort food. Even the UK’s Guardian newspaper this week carried a sizeable feature titled “Sweet, sticky and sold out everywhere: why is there such a craze for Dubai chocolate?”

Food is part of a place’s cultural identity. Plenty of cities and countries have dishes associated with them. Think the po’boys of Louisiana, the fish and chips of the UK, German sausages and Japanese sushi.

Some cities are lucky enough to get their names on the brand. There’s the Philadelphia cheese steak, Brussels sprouts, hamburgers and frankfurters.

Countries may choose to use food specifically to build their national branding. South Korea’s use of K-pop and television dramas has a sister policy of “kimchi diplomacy”. Its fermented cabbage dish and other foods (fried chicken, bibimbap and Korean barbecue, for example) are used as soft-power tools to make Seoul and its surroundings more palatable as a destination, and to elevate the country’s status in the world’s collective consciousness.

Even neighbouring North Korea has a chain of government-run “Pyongyang” restaurants around the world. There was one in Deira, Dubai, until a few years ago. 

Food is a very effective pillar of cultural diplomacy – which brings a 12-to-one return on investment, according to British Council and Portland Communications research.

What Dubai has in its eponymous chocolate is easily exportable cultural branding. The city is already known for some things, and wants to be known for many more. But after you take a trip to Dubai, you can’t bring year-round sunshine, a seven-star hotel or low taxes back home with you.

You can, however, bring back a bar of Dubai chocolate for family and friends. Or you can go to a supermarket or specialist chocolatier in your home town and buy a bar to magic you back to the Palm and Bab Al Shams.

The tangibility and portability of that bar is up there with Guinness from Dublin, jerky from Cape Town and Turkish delight from Istanbul.

I would posit – and I’m looking forward to being proved wrong – that the only comparable foods from the GCC are dates from Saudi Arabia and Chips Oman potato crisps.

It is hard to engineer culinary branding like Dubai chocolate. When it happens, it’s often organic. (Though incumbent agencies will line up to say they did it.)

Not all foods named after a place are even from there at all. French fries, Danish pastries, chicken Kiev and the Scotch egg are all geographically misbranded. Hawaiian pizza was created by Greek-born Sam Panopoulos, who was living in Canada at the time.

Perhaps the most confusing named-for-a-place food comes out at Christmas or Thanksgiving. Brits called the bird a turkey because they thought it was from Turkey. It is called hindi in Turkey because people thought it was from India. In India, it is called Peru pakshi. In Arabic, it is the Roman bird; in Greece it is the French bird; and the Dutch call it the Calicut hen. (Turkeys are native to the Americas.)

Thankfully for us, Dubai chocolate is UAE-born and bred and known around the world. Isn’t that sweet?

Austyn Allison is an editorial consultant and journalist who has covered Middle East advertising since 2007

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