How Mirzam Brings the Romance of the Spice Route to Craft Chocolate in Dubai

Kathy Johnston courtesy of Mirzam

Kathy Johnston of Dubai’s Mirzam Chocolate boasts an enviable title: Chief Chocolate Officer. A native New Zealander who had spent nearly her entire life in Dubai, Johnston reports a life-long love of chocolate deserving of the title: “Since I was very, very young, I’ve always been obsessed with chocolate,” she says. “My mum would hide the chocolate in the house, and she was convinced I could smell it, because wherever she would hide it, I would find it.” This was an obsession she even sought to try to “cure” in her adulthood. When those efforts proved futile, she realized that perhaps chocolate-making was her calling.

Johnston had quit her marketing job and had already bought a ticket to where she believed a serious chocolate-maker needed to be—Switzerland—when a former marketing client introduced her to an Emirati brother and sister, (who choose to remain anonymous in the business,) who were interested in doing in Dubai exactly what Johnston wanted to do, albeit where there was no existing model for a local, bean-to-bar chocolate operation.

Mini chocolate bars photo credit Mirzam

Fine Chocolate That Tells an Emirati Story

With this auspicious introduction, Johnston decided to remain in the U.A.E., and Mirzam chocolate was born.

Mirzam is the name of a particular star that was an important celestial presence in the development of the area. “We used that name because it was part of the historical trading relationships,” Johnston explains. These historical spice trade routes, in which Dubai was at the center, became the inspiration for the brand: Johnston and her partners sourced cocoa beans and other ingredients from places whose products became part of Emirati culture and flavor from passing through Dubai’s historical ports. The brand’s artwork features maps of the spice trade routes, and even the chocolate itself is embossed with a pattern intended to denote the waves that seafaring traders faced.

“During the time of year at the beginning of summer when the Mirzam star becomes visible on the horizon, it heralded the arrival of ripe dates,” explains Johnston. (“Mirzam” means “the herald.”) “So the star meant that the Arabs that had moved to the coast to fish for the season could move back to the deserts to harvest dates.”

Mirzam confections photo credit Mirzam

Appropriately, dates also play a large role in Mirzam’s chocolates, from a variety of chocolate-covered, local Khalas dates, to an award-winning dark chocolate bar scented with fennel whose caramel-like interior is a mixture of date paste and date syrup.

Chocolate Culture in Dubai

The city of Dubai is a melting pot in more than one way. First, it’s really, really hot: good for the melting stage of fine chocolate making, potentially difficult for shipping, although Johnston reports that cold storage logistics in the U.A.E. actually improved for small businesses like Mirzam during the pandemic. Second, Dubai is a cultural melting pot: a place where a majority of the citizens aren’t actually from the U.A.E., so it’s a city with a truly international feel. Despite this, as few as 5 years ago, Dubai didn’t have much of a culture for locally-made, craft chocolate. Fine chocolate was only something that was imported from Europe, and local chocolatiers were focused mostly on chocolate that could be cheaply transformed into grandiose “celebration trays” that were hugely popular in the region beginning in the 1980s.

In order to get the word out and educate potential consumers on what Mirzam was doing, and how it was different than anything that had been made in Dubai before, Johnston kept every aspect of the business transparent. “Everything’s behind the glass, you can visit 7 days a week, see everything being made,” she says. “And we think even though there’s so many different nationalities here and so many different languages, it’s been so helpful for us to be able to show people what we’re doing. There’s nothing to hide. That’s been very beneficial.”

Johnston also nodded to Dubai’s melting pot character in creating certain cross-cultural products within Mirzam’s lineup. Noting that Dubai is a vibrant city where everyone gets really involved in everyone else’s religious observances, she sought to make chocolate Easter eggs with a uniquely Middle Eastern feel. “I wanted to create something that connected a little bit more for people here, which is the story of the eggs of the Emirates,” she says, creating various chocolate eggs around the idea of native birds: flamingo, Arabian green bee-eater, and falcon. “I actually thought people might be a little bit angry with me for making Arabic birds into easter eggs,” says Johnston, “but everybody was really excited, most of the people who bought the Easter eggs were native Arabs, and nobody got mad at me, so I was really happy.”

Cacao sourced from India photo credit Mirzam

Despite the risk in building a bean-to-bar chocolate business with no precedent in Dubai, Johnston found that people were receptive: “We found from the very beginning that people perhaps weren’t buying dark chocolate here or interested in craft chocolate simply because it wasn’t readily available,” she says. When I asked her whether she felt like she was actually responsible for creating a culture for fine chocolate in the United Arab Emirates, her answer was a self-deprecating one: “I’m creating an awful lot of work for myself,” she said, laughing. But for a Chief Chocolate Officer whose lifelong passion is the driving force behind the business, it’s clear that it’s a labor of love written in the stars.

For similar reading see: Is Sense of Place The Next Big Thing in Chocolate After Single Origin?