Pistachios and Climate Change: Inside Dubai Chocolate Is a Very California Story

The warm and velvety smell of cacao permeates every corner of The Xocolate Bar, an independent chocolate shop in Berkeley.

In the kitchen, you’ll also detect the aroma of freshly ground pistachios, as owner Malena López-Maggi blends these crunchy green gems down to a rich and silky butter — all in pursuit of the tastiest “Dubai chocolate” bar she can conjure.

This crunchy, gooey and savory combination of chocolate, pistachio cream, tahini and kataifi — has become a worldwide culinary phenomenon since United Arab Emirates-based chocolatier Sarah Hamouda first crafted the recipe in 2021. In the years since, influencers from all over the world have posted videos of themselves savoring Dubai chocolate, which has now become synonymous with a certain feeling of epicurean luxury.

You have to taste Dubai chocolate to understand why it’s become such a social media phenomenon, López-Maggi says. “The kataifi is nice and toasty, then you mix it with really creamy pistachio butter and shove it into a thick chocolate shell. When you bite it, it’s audibly crunchy — an ASMR-type of sound.”

As demand for Hamoud’s creation has skyrocketed — 1.2 million bars were sold at Dubai’s airport alone in April — the concoction has been used in everything from sundaes at San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square to edible Labubus.

López-Maggi says she didn’t jump on the Dubai chocolate craze when she first saw it on her social media feed last year. “We thought this was going to blow over quickly — ‘it’s a TikTok trend,’” she recalls.

But unlike other online fads of the 2020s, the allure of this sweet treat has far from faded. With customers coming into her stores every week looking for Dubai chocolate, López-Maggi crafted her own recipe earlier this year. And for one key ingredient — the pistachios that give the chocolate bar its bright-green accents — she turned not to her previous Italian suppliers but to California’s Central Valley.

When you savor a chocolate treat mixed with pistachio in the United States, while you may just see Dubai’s name on the label it’s actually rural California towns — Mendota, Coalinga, Wasco, Chowchilla, to name a few — that harvest over 98% of pistachios grown nationally. And sourcing her pistachios so close to home helped López-Maggi cut costs when the price of cocoa quadrupled in just a few years due to ongoing drought conditions in West Africa.

As Dubai chocolate’s popularity soars, so has the demand for this unassuming nut that for decades has quietly thrived in the heat of the Central Valley and provided a livelihood to generations of rural and immigrant communities. But while the state’s pistachio growers and chocolatiers have big dreams of what could come from this culinary phenomenon, California faces a dryer, hotter future that could soon put all of that to the test.

The view from pistachio country

Walking between the rows of pistachio trees in a Fresno County orchard, dressed in a black cowboy hat and boots, William Bordeau points out the large machine moving from tree to tree — clamping onto each’s trunk and vigorously shaking thousands of ripe nuts from its branches.

Standing in this orchard, the long-tailed machine — known as a tree shaker — feels like it’s conjuring earthquakes with each jolt. Ripe pistachios rain down into large containers and within hours, the tree shaker can collect up to 3,000 pounds of nuts.

Bordeau has been a U.S. Marine, a casino manager and a schoolteacher, but says that pistachio grower is one of the most satisfying jobs he’s had. There may be more money in other industries, he adds, “but you don’t feel like you’re giving back to society like you do when you’re providing safe, affordable, nutritious food.”

Born in the small town of Coalinga to a family that’s lived in the Central Valley for four generations, Bordeau has worked with all kinds of crops. “This is some of the most productive land in the world,” he says.

But pistachios are tricky. A tree must first grow for about seven years until it’s ready to yield nuts that can be sold on the market.

For many farmers, that’s too long. But those who do wait get to reap the rewards: a crop that can live on significantly less water than its more popular cousin, almonds. “This is a hardy plant,” Bordeau says. “Pistachios are very drought tolerant.”

Pistachios are native to the deserts of Central Asia, and the long, dry Central Valley summers pack enough heat, comparatively, for them to grow. Only Iran — where farmers have been growing them for millennia — rivals how much California can produce: Just last year, the Golden State harvested over a billion pounds of this little green nut.

“Historically, pistachios have been seen more as a snack,” Bordeau says. “But we also want it to be something you can have in all these wonderful dishes, like Dubai chocolate.”

No water, no pistachios

How much water a California farmer can use is determined by a local water district that keeps track of available groundwater and distributes it accordingly. But those agencies have limits — and state law requires them to hand out only as much water as underground aquifers can handle without running dry over time.

So if California has a dry year when aquifers are running low, farmers like Bordeau receive a much smaller allocation, regardless of market demand for the crop they’re growing. And water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta — the only other source of water for many pistachio farms — is controlled by federal regulators that cut water deliveries if they threaten the survival of wildlife in the Delta.

While pistachios may be less water-dependent than other crops, “if we’re not allocated any water, we can’t farm,” says Bordeau, who also sits on the board of directors of the Westlands Water District, the largest agricultural water agency in the U.S.. “We need to invest in our water infrastructure: reservoirs, conveyance mechanisms and canals.”

It’s a paradox wrapped in gold foil: the key ingredients of Dubai chocolate — cacao and pistachios — are both highly vulnerable to climate change, a crisis partly fueled by greenhouse gas emissions. And the United Arab Emirates, home to Dubai, ranks among the world’s top emitters on a per capita basis. On a warmer planet, farmers will need more water to keep growing these crops.

At the state level, Gov. Gavin Newsom is betting big on the controversial $20 billion Delta Conveyance Project, which would move more water from the state’s northern half through a tunnel to then distribute to other regions. And even President Donald Trump has stepped into California’s water woes, ordering his administration on his first day back in the White House to “route more water” from reservoirs in the Delta to the Central Valley — an action many state officials labeled as a publicity stunt.

But researchers warn that due to climate change, California faces a future where droughts will become more frequent and longer. Warmer temperatures could also increase soil salinity — how much salt is in the ground — and push farmers to use more water to counteract it.

In order to make every single drop of water count, growers have teamed up with environmentalists to design more efficient irrigation methods and in some instances, abandoning more water-intensive crops. But a drought that lasts multiple years could strain even pistachios, which can normally weather more saline conditions, says Phoebe Gordon, orchard systems advisor at the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources unit.

“How long can you keep on irrigating these trees under limited water conditions and have them continue to perform, to be able to pay the bills?” asks Gordon.

“Yield will decline — that is absolutely not a question,” she says.

The melting point

Outside of the Central Valley, climate change is coming for the other parts of your Dubai chocolate bar, too.

When droughts in West Africa caused cocoa prices to skyrocket earlier this year, Bay Area chocolatier López-Maggi had to let go half of her staff and shut down her wholesale business, which supplied over 400 retail stores.

“Wholesale margins are already so thin that when your ingredient prices more than double — I mean, people are only willing to pay a certain amount for food,” she says. “So many of my colleagues went out of business.”

Cocoa prices are slowly coming back down to Earth, but López-Maggi is preparing for a future where climate change permanently alters the chocolate supply chain. In response to these fluctuating costs, big brands like Hershey’s and Mars are already marketing products with less chocolate content, or substituting it with cheaper alternatives like palm oil.

But nothing can replace the best ingredients, López-Maggi says. “Chocolate, it’s called theobroma cacao for a reason: food of the gods,” she says. “There’s all these special magic things about chocolate you just can’t fake.”

Back in the Central Valley, it’s farmworkers who are the first to feel the consequences when there’s not enough water here.

“When we plant less, that equals less jobs for people,” says Joe Coelho, a Fresno County farmer and director of sustainability and member outreach for the industry group American Pistachio Growers. Many people who work his fields are from the small town of Mendota, a community where over 90% of residents are Latino. A large proportion of residents have recently arrived from El Salvador and about a third live below the federal poverty line.

According to the latest Census data, around half of Mendota residents are unemployed — a number that can spike dramatically during drought years.

“These are our friends, our family. I’ve spent years of my life bleeding in the fields with these people,” says Coelho, who grew up on a farm in nearby Riverdale. “Agriculture is the backbone of life out here in the Central Valley.”

Coelho first met fellow pistachio grower Bordeau when they were both in their teens. Decades later, the two have their own families and farms. They can talk about almost anything for hours: pistachios, new irrigation technologies and the heat from the Central Valley sun, which quickly evaporates any drop of water that falls on the soil here.

“We’re trying to find a way that we can still succeed,” Bordeau says. “Solutions exist, man.”