The Country That Remade a Chocolate Bar
The original Dubai chocolate bar was created in 2021. Sarah Hamouda, a British-Egyptian engineer living in Dubai, was pregnant and craving something that combined the flavors her mother used to cook — pistachio, tahini, the crisp threads of knafeh pastry — wrapped in milk chocolate. She and her business partner, chef Nouel Catis Omamalin, made it. They called it "Can't Get Knafeh of It." For two years, it sold quietly in Dubai. Then a TikTok creator named Maria Vehera posted herself eating it, and that video collected more than 120 million views. By 2024, the bar was a global sensation. Waitrose in the UK imposed purchase limits. Resellers in Singapore were pricing it at more than three times retail. Searches for "Dubai chocolate" went from near zero to peak levels in weeks.
Korea did not create the Dubai chocolate bar. What Korea did was turn it into something the original could not have become on its own. And in doing so, Korea also revealed something important about how it has become, almost without intending to, the world's most effective machine for processing and re-exporting food trends.
 |
| A bar from Dubai, a craze made in Korea, a queue that formed everywhere else. |
What Korea Does With What It Receives
The bar arrived in Seoul's premium department stores in late 2023, priced around 17,000 KRW — roughly the cost of a decent restaurant lunch. Major department stores like Shinsegae and Lotte World Mall reported daily queues. The bars sold out within 30 minutes, often on weekdays. They entered the secondhand resale market at marked-up prices. Google Trends data confirmed it: searches for "Dubai chocolate" in Korean spiked from near zero to peak levels within a month of the bar entering the market.
That would have been enough to make it a noteworthy moment. But then Korea did what Korea does.
Convenience store chain CU launched its own Dubai-style chocolate bar, priced at 4,000 KRW — under three dollars. Its first batch of 200,000 units sold out in a single day. GS25 and 7-Eleven followed with their own versions. By late 2025, Dubai-related desserts at GS25 alone were posting year-on-year sales growth of nearly 145 percent. The concept had gone from premium import to mass-market product category in under twelve months, a speed that would be unusual in almost any other food market in the world.
Then came the mutation. Korean bakeries and independent cafes began to reimagine the Dubai concept entirely. The original bar's logic — pistachio cream, kataifi pastry, chocolate — was extracted and rebuilt into a new format: a marshmallow-based dough filled with pistachio spread and shredded kadaif, dusted in cocoa powder. Chewy, pull-apart, photogenic in cross-section. Koreans named it the Dubai chewy cookie, or more colloquially, dujjonku. It was heavier than the bar, more indulgent, and more visually suited to the short-form video format that social media algorithms prefer. A new product had been manufactured from the raw material of another country's food idea.
The Trend Cycle That Never Stops
 |
| Every Korean food trend has a window — and the country has become expert at opening the next one before the last one closes. |
To understand how Korea does this consistently, it helps to look at the pattern rather than the individual case. Dubai chocolate is not an outlier. It is one data point in a cycle that Korean food culture has been running for at least a decade.
In 2014, Haitai launched Honey Butter Chip — a potato chip glazed in honey and butter. Production shortages, possibly deliberate, turned it into a scarcity event. Lines formed at convenience stores. Within three months it was the bestselling product at all three major convenience store chains. Within two years it had produced nearly ten limited-edition variants and transitioned from viral moment to enduring market fixture. The lesson: manufactured scarcity plus social proof creates market dominance.
In 2020, Korean actor Jung Il-woo drank a whipped coffee on a television show. A viewer named Hannah Cho filmed herself recreating it. Her post was liked more than two million times. The hashtag challenge that followed accumulated tens of millions of views on TikTok. Dalgona coffee — named after a Korean candy because the frothy texture resembled it — went global within weeks, landing in kitchens in Lisbon, Los Angeles, and Lagos. The mechanism here was different: the product was democratized instantly because it required only three ingredients available anywhere on earth. But the structure was familiar: Korean media content served as the ignition, social media carried the spark, and the world's kitchens were the fuel.
Tanghulu — sugar-shelled fruit skewers with origins in northern China — arrived in Korea around 2022 and hit peak virality on TikTok and YouTube in 2023. Specialty tanghulu shops in Seoul multiplied from approximately 50 to more than 500 within months. Then the trend reversed equally fast, and by mid-2024 closures were outpacing openings. The lesson from tanghulu was a different one: oversaturation at speed destroys the scarcity signal that made the product feel worth seeking out. When a trend is everywhere simultaneously, the queue disappears, and so does much of the product's appeal.
The Dubai chocolate cycle sits somewhere between the Honey Butter Chip durability and the tanghulu burnout — but the reason it has lasted longer than most is that Korea kept innovating on top of the original. Each new iteration reset the novelty clock. The original bar became a category. The dujjonku gave the category a second chapter. Then came Dubai crepes, Dubai lattes, Dubai-style frozen sorbet bars in convenience store freezers. The flavour architecture — pistachio, kataifi, chocolate — became a platform, and Korea kept building on it.
The Viral Queue as Product Feature
 |
| The line is part of the product. In Korea, waiting has become proof that something is worth eating. |
One aspect of Korea's trend mechanism that rarely gets enough credit is what the queue actually does. In most commercial contexts, a queue is a problem — a friction point that discourages purchase and signals poor supply planning. In Korean food culture, the queue is a feature. It is proof that what is inside is worth having.
When IVE's Jang Won-young mentioned Dubai chocolate on a web show in early 2025, the host noted that the trend had already peaked and faded. She disagreed and predicted Dubai chocolate would come back as the year's first trend. When the Dubai chewy cookie emerged weeks later and she posted about it, cafes rushed to stock their own versions within hours of her post going up. Reservation slots for specialty bakeries sold out in minutes. Some shops imposed "one cookie per person" limits. Online food communities began sharing real-time maps tracking which shops still had stock available. The financial platform Toss integrated the Dubai cookie hunt into its marketing activities.
That ecosystem — idol endorsement, immediate media amplification, scarcity mechanics, real-time community tracking, and mass convenience store deployment — is not an accident. It is a system that Korea has built and refined over years of food trend cycles. The queue is not just what happens when something is popular. The queue is what makes it more popular. Waiting in line, photographing the wait, sharing the wait, and then photographing what comes at the end of the wait — that is the full circuit, and every step of it generates content that keeps the cycle moving.
Palette Dessert, one of the first Seoul cafes to offer the Dubai chewy cookie, had lines running out the door within days. Purchase limits were instituted. Cookies that retailed at 5,300 KRW were being resold for 7,500 to 8,000 KRW on secondhand platforms. A pop-up at the Shinsegae Gangnam department store replicated the same dynamic — long waits, sold-out batches, social media documentation of every step. The scarcity was not entirely manufactured, but it was also not entirely incidental. Korea's food trend culture has a deep structural preference for the thing that cannot yet be freely obtained.
Why Korea Does This Better Than Anyone
There are practical reasons. Korea has an exceptionally dense urban population concentrated in Seoul, where new concepts reach a critical mass of early adopters faster than in almost any other city. Korea's convenience store network — with chains like CU, GS25, and 7-Eleven operating thousands of locations each — provides a mass-market deployment mechanism with virtually no lag time. Once a premium cafe trend hits virality, the convenience store version typically follows within weeks, making the same flavour accessible to the full market rather than just those willing to pay premium prices or wait in premium lines.
There are also cultural reasons. Korean consumers — particularly the MZ generation, the cohort of millennials and Gen Z that drives the country's trend economy — have an unusually high tolerance for trend participation as a social activity. Trying the new thing is not just about the food. It is a form of cultural membership, a way of being present at a moment that will be remembered and referenced in group chats and content feeds. Research from consumer studies academics in Korea consistently points to the same factors: visual impact, social proof, and the fear of missing a collectively shared experience.
And there is the export infrastructure of Hallyu — the Korean Wave — that was already in place before any of these food trends arrived. K-drama scenes featuring food have a documented effect on viewer desire. K-pop idols mentioning a product creates purchase intent at scale across international fan communities. The cultural reach of Korean content in 2025 is broad enough that a trend reaching virality in Seoul can propagate to Los Angeles, Jakarta, and London within days, particularly if an idol is involved.
The Thing That Makes It Stick
Not every trend Korea runs through this machine comes out the other side as a lasting export. Tanghulu is unlikely to define a global dessert category. But the Dubai chewy cookie, like the croffle before it and dalgona coffee before that, has the qualities that give a Korean-processed food trend genuine staying power internationally: a recognizable visual, a describable texture, a replicable structure that home cooks and local bakeries around the world can attempt with widely available ingredients, and a flavour architecture — in this case, pistachio plus pastry plus chocolate — that has demonstrated lasting commercial appeal well beyond the initial hype cycle.
By early 2025, pistachio prices had jumped 34 percent globally. Supply chains were strained. Supermarkets in multiple countries had introduced purchase limits on pistachio products. A chocolate bar made in Dubai had, via Korea's processing system, contributed measurably to a global commodity price movement. That is a particular kind of influence — the kind that shows up in agricultural economics, not just social media analytics.
Korea did not invent the Dubai chocolate. It received the idea, subjected it to pressure it was never designed for, and sent something different out the other side. That is what Korea's food trend machine actually does. The next thing entering that system right now is already on someone's feed. The cycle does not wait for the last one to finish.
References
Wikipedia, "Dubai Chocolate," updated May 2026. Daxue Consulting, "Food Fad Sweeping in Korea: Why and How Brands Jump on Trends," March 2026. The Korea Herald, "In South Korea, Dubai Chocolate Becomes Its Own Dessert Category," December 2025. The Korea Times, "Honey Butter Chip, Tanghulu, Dujjonku: Rise and Fall of Korea's Viral Food Trends," January 2026. KoreaTravelPost, "Korean Viral Food Trends: How FOMO, Social Media and Consumer Psychology Drive — and Doom — Snack Fads," February 2026. Postdigitalist, "Pistachio Craze Trend Analysis: From Dubai Chocolate to Global Markets," December 2025. Allkpop, "IVE's Jang Won Young Predicted the Dubai Dessert Resurgence," December 2025. Tastewise, "Dubai Chocolate Trend: Why It's Going Viral," July 2025. Foodnavigator Asia, "Viral Hit Dubai Chocolate Underscores Impact of Social Media, Exclusivity and Regional Flavours," August 2024. Sprudge Coffee, "What Is Dalgona Coffee," 2020.
Explore more Insights into Korean Lifestyle:
- food / insight / k-food / korean convenience food / microwave mealsJun 12, 2026
- food / InstantFood / k-food / KoreanRamen / ktoday / pillarJun 11, 2026
- food / FrozenFood / HMart / k-food / ktoday / ManduJun 11, 2026
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
0 Comments