People · Food · CrACKLES
The Woman Who Gave Rice Crispy Treats a Second Life
Muna Rahim did not set out to build a brand. She set out to make something her daughter would love. CrACKLES, now with a permanent home at Times Square Center, is what happened next.
There is a particular kind of founder story that Dubai produces in abundance: the pivot, the loud launch, the series of increasingly amplified announcements. Muna Rahim’s story is not that. CrACKLES, the UAE’s first gourmet rice crispy treat brand, was built slowly, deliberately, and almost entirely around the question of how something feels rather than how it performs.
“I grew up with rice crispy treats as something very simple and nostalgic,” Rahim says. “They were homemade, comforting and never trying too hard. That’s the part I wanted to keep.” What she left behind was the idea that they had to stay basic. Better ingredients, more refined flavours, packaging designed to be gifted rather than simply bought. The soul of the product stayed intact. Everything else was rebuilt from the ground up.
Where It Began
A Birthday Party. A Signal. A Business.
CrACKLES started in 2021 at a birthday party. Rahim was planning a movie-night celebration for her daughter and reached back to the rice crispy treats she had grown up with in Canada, remaking them with her own twist. The reaction was immediate. Friends asked for more. Then families. Then strangers.
“People started messaging me asking if I sold them, if I could make them for birthdays, gifts, classrooms,” she recalls. “That was the first moment where I realised this reaction was bigger than just ‘these are nice.'”
The Founder
It Was Not a Business Plan. It Was a Signal.
Building a food brand in the UAE without a formal background means learning almost everything in real time. The reality behind a polished brand involves accounting, sourcing, production, customer service and a hundred small decisions every day.
“I knew resilience would be necessary,” she says. “But I don’t think I fully understood the level of emotional endurance it takes to keep showing up for your team, your customers and your brand every single day while carrying the weight of everything happening in the background.”
The Process
How to Elevate Something This Simple
Elevating something as simple as a rice crispy treat is a specific creative challenge. The ingredient list is short. The nostalgia is load-bearing. Change too much and you lose the feeling that made people respond. Rahim’s process begins casually: a flavour combination, a seasonal moment, a conversation about gifting. Then the kitchen, where texture is tested, sweetness calibrated, and the visual and edible weighed against each other. “Sometimes something looks beautiful but doesn’t taste balanced. Or it tastes great but doesn’t feel CrACKLES.” She knows when something is ready by feel. “When the flavour, design and feeling all align and it looks like it always belonged in the brand.”
Built for This Market
The UAE Gifting Culture Shaped Everything
The UAE’s gifting culture did not just shape CrACKLES. It gave the brand its direction. People here were not simply buying a dessert. They were buying something to bring to a celebration, send to an office, personalise for a corporate event, thank a teacher with. “That completely changed how I approached packaging, customisation and product development,” Rahim says. Edible logos for corporate clients. Custom palettes for milestones. Seasonal collections designed to feel considered. The product became a vehicle for the emotional work that gifting is always trying to do.
A Permanent Home
Times Square Center, and What It Changes
CrACKLES now has its first physical retail space at Times Square Center, and the choice says something deliberate. This is not a high-gloss mall opening. Times Square Center is community-led, family-oriented, the kind of place where people linger. “It feels more community-driven, more personal and creative, which is very similar to how I’ve tried to build CrACKLES,” Rahim says. In-store, the experience has returned something years of building online had made harder to access: real-time human reaction. “It has reminded me that CrACKLES was always meant to feel personal and joyful.”
Her Daughter’s Influence
Children Are Honest in Ways Adults Rarely Are
“Children are very honest, visually driven and emotionally reactive,” Rahim says. “They respond immediately to colour, excitement, presentation and how something makes them feel.” She traces the brand’s playfulness and sense of occasion directly to those early years of building around childhood celebrations. That lens has stayed. It shows in every seasonal design.
The Slow Build
Quiet Consistency Matters More Than Loud Moments
Dubai is full of food brands that arrive loudly and disappear. CrACKLES has not followed that arc. “I never approached CrACKLES as a trend or a quick launch moment. I approached it as something I genuinely wanted to build carefully over time.” Quality, branding and customer experience held steady even when the brand was still very small. Her advice: “Don’t wait until everything feels perfect. Quiet consistency matters more than loud moments.”
For Boujeez
A Homegrown Story Worth Telling
For Boujeez, CrACKLES is precisely the kind of story the Gulf deserves more of: a concept built on instinct, flavour, and an unwavering commitment to making people feel something. From a birthday party in 2021 to a permanent retail home in Dubai, the brand has earned every step of its following.
CrACKLES is now open at Times Square Center, Dubai. Explore the full range at cracklesuae.com or follow @crackles_uae on Instagram.