Who Invented Dubai Chocolate? The Real Founders
Meet the Real Team Behind Dubai Chocolate: Sarah Hamouda, Yezen Alani & Nouel Catis Omamalin
Most coverage credits one founder. The real story involves three people, a pregnancy craving, a corporate day job, and a chef who left the partnership but kept helping anyway.
Search "who invented Dubai chocolate" and you'll get a confusing mix of answers — some articles credit one woman, some credit a couple, and a handful mention a third name almost in passing. The full, accurate story involves three specific people, each playing a distinct and necessary role in creating what would become a global food phenomenon. Here's the real account, sourced from interviews, court and press records, and the company's own public statements.
Sarah Hamouda is a British-Egyptian engineer who was living and working in Dubai in 2021 when the idea for what would become Dubai chocolate first took shape. According to her own account, she was pregnant at the time and experiencing a specific, persistent craving — a combination of chocolate, pistachio, tahini, and knafeh, the Middle Eastern dessert made from kataifi pastry, syrup, and soft cheese. The craving connected to a sweet dish her mother had made for her during childhood. No product on the market came close to satisfying it, so she decided to build one herself.
"I wanted to create something that felt personal but relatable. A brand that tapped into nostalgia without leaning too heavily on it, and felt premium without being intimidating."
At the time, Hamouda was working a full-time corporate job, alongside her husband Yezen Alani, who would become her business partner. Both continued working their day jobs well into the brand's early growth, building the company nights and weekends until demand made stepping away from corporate work the only viable path forward.
Yezen Alani is Sarah Hamouda's husband and the co-founder and co-owner of FIX Dessert Chocolatier alongside her. While Hamouda is most frequently the public face of the brand in press coverage, Alani has been an equal business partner from the beginning — and by his own account, played a specific creative role that's often overlooked: naming the bars.
"Yezen, my husband, has been instrumental in naming our bars. He added that quirky twist that makes people smile."
The punny, attention-grabbing names across the FIX Heroes lineup — "Can't Get Knafeh of It," "Mind Your Own Buiscoff," "Butter to Be Safe Than Salty" — trace back to Alani's contribution to the brand's voice and personality. As the brand scaled from a one-person passion project to a full team reportedly producing around 500 bars a day, Alani has also been a vocal public defender of the brand against the wave of copycat products that followed its viral success, speaking directly to outlets including the BBC about the impact of imitation products on customer trust.
"The dupes are very frustrating because people are trying knockoffs, which damages our brand."
Nouel Catis Omamalin is a Filipino chef and culinary consultant, trained as a pastry chef, who Hamouda contacted to help turn her craving into an actual, workable recipe. According to accounts from both Hamouda and Omamalin, Hamouda had been developing ideas at home before bringing him in specifically to help engineer the technical execution — balancing the pistachio-tahini cream, managing the kataifi pastry's texture, and getting the overall filling-to-chocolate ratio right.
- By the time FIX officially launched its first product, Omamalin had left the formal business partnership.
- However, he continued working with Hamouda on the recipe afterward — by his own description, doing so "as a friend" rather than as a business partner.
- This means the recipe that eventually became "Can't Get Knafeh of It" was refined collaboratively well past the point where Omamalin held any formal ownership stake in the company — a detail most simplified retellings of the story leave out entirely.
- It took until early 2023 for Hamouda to say they had "finally... nailed it" on the recipe — over a year of continued refinement after the brand's original 2022 launch.
The Bar Three People Built From Scratch
Not a corporate product. A craving, a chef, and a couple who quit their jobs to chase it.
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Sarah Hamouda, pregnant and craving a chocolate-pistachio-tahini-knafeh combination that didn't exist on the market, begins developing the concept at home before bringing in Nouel Catis Omamalin to help engineer the recipe.
The first version of the bar — pistachio, tahini, and kadayif, wrapped in a chocolate shell with distinctive yellow and green packaging — launches through FIX's online store. Bars are entirely handmade; a team working six to eight hours produces around 25 bars a day, sold initially at a rate of one per week, at £16 each.
After a full year of continued modification, Hamouda says they finally perfected the recipe balance — still over a year before the product would become globally famous.
TikTok creator Maria Vehera posts a video of herself trying the bar. It goes on to accumulate nearly seven million likes, and "Can't Get Knafeh of It" becomes globally known under a new name: Dubai chocolate.
The Video That Changed Everything
The specific creator behind the viral moment is often left out of broader coverage entirely. It was TikTok creator Maria Vehera who posted the video, in December 2023, that captured the bar's distinctive crack-and-crunch eating experience and introduced it to a massive new audience.
"Maria's video captured the essence of FIX in such a real way."
The aftermath was immediate and overwhelming. In the hour after the video took off, FIX reportedly received around 30,000 orders — and had no remaining stock at the time. The team had to pivot quickly to handle pre-orders and scale production as fast as possible, a process Hamouda has described candidly in multiple interviews as both thrilling and genuinely difficult to manage in real time.
"Nobody plans for 30,000 orders in an hour with zero bars in stock. You just find out, in real time, what your team is actually capable of."
Where the Team Stands Today
FIX has reportedly scaled from a one-person operation into a full team of around 50 people, producing approximately 500 bars a day — a substantial increase from the original 25-bars-a-day, once-a-week model, though still operating at a deliberately controlled, limited scale relative to the overall global demand for "Dubai chocolate" products.
Hamouda and Alani have continued running the company together, now full-time, while fiercely guarding the original recipe and pushing back publicly against the wave of imitation products using the "Dubai chocolate" name without any connection to the actual originating brand. Sales are managed through a dedicated app with limited daily ordering windows — a system designed to manage demand while preserving the brand's original artisanal, limited-edition character even at significantly larger scale.
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The Real People Behind the Bar That Changed Everything
A craving, a chef, and a couple who built it from scratch — handcrafted in Dubai since 2021.
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