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It sold out “ Your browser does not support the element. in four days. TheAldonSchokolade Dubai Style” was created by at a fancy hotel in the centre of Berlin. It came in 500g bars with ingredients like home-roasted pistachios and French Valrhona chocolate. Only 50 were made and they went for the princely sum of €69 ($71) apiece in November.Germans usually resist food fashions. But since the end of last year they have been hit with the Dubai chocolate craze. All over the country people have feasted on imaginative treats based on the richly textured chocolate bars. At Christmas markets the young and old queued for Dubai chocolate crêpes, hot Dubai chocolate, Dubai-style roasted almonds and Dubai churros. A stand at one of Berlin’s markets even sold a half-metre Dubai Bratwurst for €8. And when Lindt, a Swiss chocolate-maker, launched a limited edition 150g bar called Lindt Dubai Style Chocolade for €14.99, people queued for hours at shops in Düsseldorf and in Berlin.Dubai chocolate was created by Sarah Hamouda, a British-Egyptian entrepreneur based in Dubai, when she was pregnant in 2021 and craved an unusual chocolate bar. She concocted a mix of pistachio cream, sesame paste and , a crispy filo dough, which she encased in milk chocolate. The colourful creations of the company she subsequently created, Fix Dessert Chocolatier, became a viral sensation after Maria Vehera, a food influencer, posted a video of herself eating a Fix chocolate bar on TikTok in 2023. It has since been viewed more than 100m times.The success of the product is stirring up trouble at the border. Last month customs officials confiscated 90kg of Dubai chocolate from a woman at Hamburg airport. She had not paid import duties, and the sheer scale of the haul (the chocolates were distributed between three suitcases) suggested that she intended to sell them.It is also the cause of corporate litigation. A court in Cologne recently sided with Andreas Wilmers, an importer of chocolates from Dubai, who sued Aldi, a discount supermarket chain, over its sales of the low-cost “Alyan Dubai Handmade Chocolate”. Aldi sold the chocolate bars, which are made in Turkey, for €3.79, vastly undercutting the €29.99 Mr Wilmers charges for his imported handmade wares. The judge concluded that consumers might assume the chocolate was made in Dubai because of its name. Aldi has since dropped Dubai chocolate from its online offering. Mr Wilmers is also suing Lindt (the firm argues that Dubai chocolate is a generic term, like “Wiener sausage”). Whatever the courts decide, the bigger question is whether the craze’s days are numbered. Germans are notoriously frugal shoppers—which is one of the reasons why Aldi and Lidl, another discount supermarket, are so successful in the country. According to a recent survey by the Institute for Generation Research, a German firm, more than 95% of respondents said that Dubai chocolate was too expensive, and more than 60% said that they were not planning to buy any more.Undeterred, Alois Müller, a dairy firm, is launching “Müllermilch Dubai Chocolate Style” next month. Much like Lindt and the Adlon hotel, Alois Müller is hedging, in case the popularity of the treat proves as ephemeral as other social-media crazes such as the cronut (a cross between a croissant and a doughnut) or the crookie (a croissant and a cookie). The chocolate-milk drink will be available in shops for eight weeks. The secret to sustaining consumers’ interest in confectionery in Germany may be keeping production runs short—and sweet.