We were making chocolate long before the world wanted a Dubai bar.

It started with a copper pan that was too heavy for any of us to lift alone. There were three of us — two sisters, Shuk and Merci, and our brother Raas — and on Friday afternoons our mother would let us into the kitchen while she made chocolate for the neighbours. Not as a business. As a habit. As the thing our family did when there was something to celebrate, or something to survive.

Even then we had our jobs. Shuk was the one who gave it away — she could not finish a tray without deciding, before it had cooled, exactly whose house each piece was going to. Merci was the one who tasted, and who was never, ever satisfied. And Raas, the youngest, was the one who asked the question none of us wanted to answer: fine, but how would we make a hundred of these? Then a thousand?

When we moved to Dubai we brought the pan with us. Shuk started selling boxes to offices, then to a hotel, then to a small retailer who wanted them every week and then every day. Merci wrote the recipes down properly for the first time. Raas built a production line in a rented unit and told us, within a month, that it was already too small. All of this happened years before anybody in the world had heard the phrase “Dubai chocolate”.

So when people find us through the pistachio-kunafa bar and assume we opened last year, we understand. The bar is new. We are not. It only came out as well as it did because by the time it arrived we already had a factory, a food-safety system, and a chocolatier who knew exactly what was wrong with everyone else’s version.

“The bar is the newest thing we make. It is not the reason we exist.”

Because we decided, on the first day, that we would not be a kitchen pretending to be a factory. If we were going to put our family’s name on something, it would be made in a real facility, to a real standard, by people who were paid properly to make it. That decision cost us eleven months before we were allowed to sell a single bar.

So we found a warehouse in Al Quoz. We tempered chocolate at four in the morning and threw away batches that only Merci could tell were wrong. We sat through audits. We rewrote our processes eleven times. We got BRC certified — the global food safety standard that most of the people selling “Dubai chocolate” have never applied for.

Then Merci made the bar. Real Belgian chocolate. Kunafa shredded and toasted on the day it goes in. Pistachio cream roasted in-house, nothing bought in a bucket. And Raas made forty thousand of them that were all exactly the same — which is a far harder problem than making one perfect one, and the reason a lot of very good home kitchens never become a brand.

Today there are more than 150 of us. Shuk is still on the phone to every account, and still knows which retailer wants their pallets on a Tuesday. Merci still is not satisfied. Raas still says the line is too small. The three of us still argue about texture, usually at four in the morning, usually in front of a batch nobody else can find fault with.

Real Belgian chocolate. Kunafa shredded and toasted on the day. Pistachio cream, roasted in-house, nothing bought in a bucket.

Our chocolate is in Carrefour, Lulu and Union Coop now. It arrives at people’s doors through Deliveroo, Talabat and Noon. It flies to distributors with Emirates and DHL, to countries none of us had been to when we started. And every single bar still comes out of one building in Al Quoz, Dubai, where somebody checks it by hand before it goes in the box.

That copper pan is in the front office. It’s still too heavy to lift alone.

— Shuk, Merci & Raas