"Dujjonku" Goes Global: Korea's Dubai Chewy Cookie Trend Reaches Its Origin City

The Dubai Chewy Cookie — widely abbreviated as "Dujjonku" — has emerged as the dominant force in South Korea's dessert market in early 2026. According to internal data compiled by global social media analytics firm Featuring, Dujjonku (2.6 million mentions) and Dubai Chewy Cookie (1.99 million mentions) ranked in the top 1% of hashtags across five platforms — Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok among them — in January 2026.

The numbers behind the trend are equally striking. Searches on domestic delivery applications surged approximately 1,500 times. Naver DataLab figures showed that search volume for "Dubai Chewy Cookie" climbed more than sixfold between October 2025 and January 2026. At the retail level, select department store pop-up locations and prominent bakeries reported selling out their entire daily stock within hours of opening.

Dujjonku is a Korean reinterpretation of the Dubai Chocolate trend. Drawing on the global popularity of Dubai Chocolate — which took off in 2022 — domestic dessert makers developed a product that wraps kataifi noodles and pistachio spread inside a marshmallow shell, producing a layered contrast of chewy and crunchy textures.

Featuring noted that once leading dessert shops began carrying the product, repeated sell-outs and lines at opening created an image of it as a hard-to-get item, with social media posts about the hunt for a remaining unit becoming a trend of their own. A Featuring representative stated that "what stood out was consumers not stopping at buying the product, but actively making and remixing it themselves — treating participation as part of the experience."

Convenience store chains CU and GS25 responded by releasing their own Dujjonku-inspired products, with both reporting notable sales figures. The trend has since moved beyond South Korea's borders. On January 28, 2026, Time Out Dubai listed Dujjonku as one of the trends to watch this year, describing it as "a dessert currently enjoying explosive popularity in South Korea" and predicting the wave would soon reach Dubai.

A dessert that reimagines Middle Eastern ingredients through a Korean lens has now circled back toward its point of origin.