A side hustler capitalized on the viral Dubai chocolate bar trend — and her business went from losing money to 7 figures

• After losing her job at the start of the pandemic, Brittany Nemandoust began selling chocolate kits.
• Her company struggled with fluctuating sales for years, to the point where she almost shut it down.
• She turned the business around in 2024 after capitalizing on the viral Dubai chocolate trend.

Chocbox founder Brittany Nemandoust doesn’t consider herself a baker — nor does she particularly enjoy the process of measuring ingredients and following precise instructions.

“I personally cannot even bake brownies,” the 32-year-old entrepreneur told Business Insider. “I am not a baker. I hate it. I hate having to put anything in the oven and watch it. I always burn it.”

When her sister brought home a handmade chocolate bar during the early days of the COVID pandemic, inspiring them to try making chocolate from scratch themselves, Nemandoust was pleasantly surprised with the “almost foolproof” process, she said. “You’d think it would be difficult.”

With time on her hands — the pandemic put her out of work as a dental hygienist, and she moved back into her parents’ home in LA — she started tinkering with recipes and posting her creations on Instagram.

“A lot of people were DMing me, asking, ‘How did you make that? What’s the recipe?'” said Nemandoust. She envisioned a made-to-order chocolate business and dropping the bars off at customers’ doorsteps. But that eliminated the experiential aspect. “I think the beauty in all of this is how fresh and delicious the chocolate is when you make it yourself.”

Similar to how meal kit delivery services provide all the ingredients one needs to make dinner at home, she figured she could do the same with chocolate.

“I looked online, and there was nothing out there at all,” she said. “I was like, ‘Well, no one has come up with this idea yet. That’s either a good thing or a bad thing. But, either way, I’m going to do it.'”

Launching a chocolate kit on Etsy, struggling with sales, and nearly shutting down

Nemandoust’s initial product was a box containing the necessary ingredients to make chocolate — cacao powder, cacao butter, and an agave-based sweetener — as well as an optional flavor add-on, a reusable mold, and a printed recipe.

She turned a small office space in her parents’ house into the Chocbox headquarters, where she’d label jars containing each ingredient and pack them into a box.

“When I launched in 2020, I got a lot of support just through my own social media and my friends and family,” said Nemandoust, who listed her product on her website and Etsy. Companies began reaching out and hiring her to teach virtual chocolate-making classes to their employees as a team-building activity.

The classes brought in good money and even better exposure, she said: “It was a great way to spread the word because you’re getting a Chocbox into 200 people’s hands and also meeting all these people virtually.”

Around 2022, as the at-home, DIY activities that marked the early COVID years started to slow down, so did her sales.

“I was kind of getting by financially, not really,” said Nemandoust, who started working in a dental office again, picking up three shifts a week. “Everything I would make in dental would go into my business.”

Sales fluctuated, spiking over the holidays and slowing down significantly during the spring and summer.

Around April of 2024, shortly after getting married, she and her husband, Kevin, discussed pulling the plug on the business. It had been a particularly tough spring. Sales trickled in, and weren’t covering her expenses, which included payroll for a part-time employee and rent for an office space.

At the time, “I was not profitable because it was so slow,” said Nemandoust.

Capitalizing on the viral Dubai chocolate trend

Shortly after their conversation about potentially shutting down Chocbox, the couple started noticing a TikTok trend: People were making Dubai chocolate — a chocolate bar filled with pistachio cream, tahini, and crispy kataifi pastry.

The Nemandousts, both raised by Iranian parents who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s, were particularly curious, as pistachios are a staple in Middle Eastern cuisine. They were even more intrigued when orders started coming in for Nemandoust’s molds, which had been listed on Etsy for years but never gained much traction.

“When the Dubai chocolate was becoming more trendy, people were buying my molds, and I’m like, OK, people want to make chocolate. I need to take advantage of this. This is my moment!” she said.

The ingredients, especially the kataifi and pistachio cream, aren’t exactly easy to find, she added: “I had such an advantage because I had it all.”

She headed to the Middle Eastern supermarket in her neighborhood, whipped up a recipe, and listed a pistachio knafeh stuffed chocolate kit on her site. She also listed it on TikTok Shop, a platform she’d been struggling to crack for months, with most of her videos maxing out at around 200 views.

Then, she posted a TikTok video of her and Kevin eating her Dubai chocolate creation.

They were both at home when she uploaded it and, within 20 minutes, it had about 500 views, recalled Kevin: “We checked a few minutes later and it’s at like 1,000. I’m starting to sweat, and Brit’s starting to question if this is real life.

“All of a sudden, we hear a ‘ding,’ and we’re like, ‘What’s that sound?’ We’d never heard that sound come out of Brit’s phone before. And she’s like, ‘Oh my god, I got my first sale.'”

By the end of the day, more than 100,000 people had viewed the video, and she hit the daily order limit that TikTok sets for new sellers (100). The next day, she racked up another 100 orders through TikTok Shop.

“We knew what the ingredients were and what the high-level recipe was, but we didn’t have a physical product — we didn’t have 1,000 kits that were just sitting there ready to ship,” said Kevin. They started sourcing the ingredients and packing boxes as quickly as they could.

He cited “three lucky things” that contributed to their ability to capitalize on the viral moment and fulfill each of the orders: “One, we had an office. We had somewhere to actually do this. The other thing was, we had help — a Chocbox employee who knew what we needed to do. And the other really lucky thing is, we were probably the only people out there that had a slightly thicker chocolate bar mold, which is necessary for a Dubai chocolate bar.”

The reason Nemandoust made her molds bigger in the first place, years before Dubai chocolate went viral, was simply to “give people more chocolate,” she said.

Kevin, who spent years in real estate before transitioning to working for a mental healthcare company, quit his day job at the beginning of 2025 to help grow Chocbox, which does seven figures in annual revenue, according to screenshots of sales dashboards viewed by BI.

“I quit my job to do this, and Brit stopped working as a dental hygienist to also do this. So, for sure, it’s changed our lives,” said Kevin. “We’re paying ourselves — not loads of money, but we’re paying ourselves enough to live a comfortable life in LA while we reinvest everything else we make back into the business.”

Having struggled with fluctuating sales for years before seeing her product take off, Nemandoust feels validated in her belief that “you don’t need to be perfect to start a business.

“It doesn’t have to be ready. Just put the idea out there and see how people react. And then you pivot as you go. You make changes as you go.”