Sweet Success
Meet the woman infusing the stories and spices of the United Arab Emirates into chocolate.
By Nicola Chilton
A warm hug of velvety chocolate-scented air envelops you as you enter the light-filled warehouse squeezed between a tyre shop and a flooring supplier in Dubai’s industrial Al Quoz district.
Mirzam, the UAE’s leading bean-to-bar craft chocolatier, has made this space home since 2020. Everything from the brand’s wildly popular chocolates and truffles to its caramels, pralines and spreads is made from scratch right here in a factory that’s displayed behind a glass wall, on full view to everyone who enters.
The transparency is a reflection of Mirzam’s dedication to producing ethically sourced, high-quality chocolate. From roasting to winnowing, grinding, moulding and packaging, visitors can see every stage of the chocolate-making process. The site is part factory, part café, part shop. Three children in school uniform walk in with their mothers. One wide-eyed boy shouts, “It’s a chocolate factory!”
Mirzam’s Chief Chocolate Office Kathy Johnston shares that enthusiasm. Her lifelong love of chocolate borders on obsession—she even had hypnosis at one point to try to reduce her consumption (it failed). “Chocolate is life,” she says. Her love of chocolate is matched by her passion for telling the stories of the UAE, her home since the age of three. Every Mirzam product has a story.
The Maps Collection, inspired by the maritime spice routes, includes five single-origin bars based on beans from India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam. The locations introduce different flavour notes: cocoa from Tamil Nadu brings spices, sweet lemon and honey; while the complex cocoa from Vietnam brings raspberry, grapes and apricot. The Monsters Collection is based on 62% dark chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana and infused with ingredients like rose, coffee and cardamom, and dates and fennel. It has an even more intriguing story.
Mirzam’s Chief Chocolate Officer Kathy Johnston. In top photo, using granite wheels, roasted beans are ground for several days in a process which slowly decreases the molecule size to create incredibly smooth chocolate. All photos courtesy of Mirzam.
“Traditionally, Arab traders and sailors would head out on dhows to find spices, and when they returned would tell tales of how they had been attacked by monsters on the way,” Johnston says. In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus wrote of Arabs getting cinnamon from the nests of large birds by cutting up animal carcasses and leaving them for the birds to scavenge. The birds would grab the meat and take it back to their nests, where the weight would cause them to tumble to the ground in a pile of cinnamon sticks. These apocryphal tales helped the traders to inflate prices, while deterring competitors from following the same routes.
“Our Emirati Collection talks about the recipes that were created once spices were available here,” Johnston says. The collection includes bars infused with saffron, cardamom and cinnamon reminiscent of the flavours of favourite local desserts like loqaimat, khabeesa and halwa.
Stories alone don’t make for good chocolate. Mirzam launched to the public in 2016 in Alserkal Avenue after two years of research into the kinds of recipes they wanted to create. The move to Al Quoz allowed them to expand production capacity while improving efficiency. A sourdough and pastry bakery has recently been integrated to expand the recipe range, which numbers around 270. And the chocolate isn’t only sold in the UAE. Mirzam exports to the US, UK, the Netherlands and Switzerland, employing 75 full-time staff in the factory, café and shop in Dubai, and a café in Abu Dhabi.
Like the chocolate within, Mirzam’s wrappers are distinctive, customised and created by hand. The brand works with artists from the region and beyond
Johnston says Mirzam’s success has been a “slow burn”, built on trial and error and constant learning. “From the beginning, we were learning from batch to batch and tweaking recipes as we went. We were selling out fast, and we had logistical and supply-chain issues we needed to resolve to source more cocoa beans,” she says.
Prior to taking on her role, Johnston had no formal training in chocolate-making, but she did have a passion for chocolate, science and storytelling. “Food science is very much led by chemistry, and there’s a lot of engineering that goes into our recipes,” Johnston says. “You need to think about the science of how the crystal structures of cocoa butter and sugar come together.” She approaches the chocolate-making process “not as a chef, but as a storyteller”, searching for ingredients that will convey the story she wants to tell, and then thinking how to structure the recipe.
For this year’s Eid Al Adha, Johnston found inspiration in the recent archaeological discovery of the oldest pearling settlement in the Gulf, on Siniyah Island off the coast of Umm Al Quwain. She created “salty pearls”, caramelised hazelnuts coated in chocolate and dusted with icing sugar to create a pearlescent finish. The packaging covering the “pearls” was decorated with the lyrics of a fijiri song sung by pearling crews as they headed out to sea.
Johnston’s plans for Mirzam are clear. “We want to keep making good chocolate,” she says. “I don’t want to fail, but if we fail small to be successful, that’s OK.” Chocolate is delicate, breakages happen, and sometimes recipes don’t go to plan, but she’s pragmatic. “We want to learn and improve as we go, but at least with making chocolate, we can eat whatever goes wrong.”
