The viral Dubai chocolate you queued for probably failed a UK food safety test

Thick slab, molten pistachio-and-kunafa centre, snapped open in vertical video to a satisfying crunch and a few million views.

For most of 2025 it was the most photographed confectionery in Britain, with thousands of people queuing outside independent shops for and paying double-figure prices to try.

The Food Standards Agency has now tested 45 of them, and exactly one passed every safety and labelling check it was put through. It points to a growing problem with ‘viral’ foods which consumers consume en masse based on TikTok and Instagram long before regulators are able to catch-up.

What the findings show

Eighteen of the 45 bars, spread across 14 different brands, contained an allergen that wasn’t declared on the label. Undeclared peanut turned up in 14 products while undeclared sesame was found in seven. Three bars hid both.

Put plainly, if you have a peanut allergy and you bought a Dubai-style chocolate at random from this sample, there was close to a one-in-three chance it contained peanuts that the label never mentioned.

Fortunately, the FSA didn’t wait for the full report to land. After early results came in, it issued a precautionary warning telling people with allergies not to eat Dubai-style chocolate before Christmas 2025, one of several points in the survey where the Agency acted on the data months before it was public.

Other contaminants

There are other concerns about exactly what was growing in the pistachios. Eight bars breached legal limits for mycotoxins – mostly aflatoxins, the mould-derived contaminants that accumulate in nuts stored badly and are linked to long-term rather than immediate harm.

A further 15 samples carried levels the FSA’s Public Analysts flagged as potentially elevated, but couldn’t formally assess because the products didn’t declare how much filling they contained in the first place.

This points to another problem with viral foods, which hit the market before regulations. You can’t check whether a pistachio filling breaches contaminant limits if the manufacturer never tells you how much pistachio is in there – and a chunk of this market simply didn’t.

Some of it is not even chocolate

The report found that labelling was the near-universal failure. 42 of the 45 bars got something wrong, from missing use-by dates to allergens that weren’t emphasised to absent UK importer details. 36 of the samples were found to have come from outside the UK, 22 from Türkiye, and 9 from the United Arab Emirates.

Perhaps most worrying, in 10 cases, the product in your hand didn’t legally qualify as chocolate at all. The main fat wasn’t cocoa butter but cheaper vegetable fat, which means, under the UK’s cocoa and chocolate rules, the word “chocolate” on the front was itself a mislabel.

What this actually tells us

The FSA was at pains to stress that this was a targeted survey, it deliberately went looking in the categories where it already suspected problems.

This means that the failure rates aren’t a verdict on the average British supermarket shelf but close to a ‘worst case scenario’.

“These findings come from a targeted survey – focusing on areas where we already suspect potential non-compliance,” Rebecca Sudworth, Director of Policy at the FSA, said. “They are not reflective of wider food safety and standards in the UK.”

But the Dubai chocolate results do show a clear structural pattern of compliance falling off a cliff as you move away from big retailers. Samples from large operators passed 82% of the time. From smaller food businesses – the discount stores, independents and online marketplaces where viral imports actually get sold – it was 64%.

A product can go from a Dubai café to a British corner shop to your camera roll faster than any importer paperwork, allergen check or contaminant test can catch up.

The full survey is available in the research section of the FSA’s website.

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