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Hershey’s has finally jumped on the Dubai chocolate trend, and it typifies the intentional approach the company is taking to viral candy. The Hershey’s Company announced it’s releasing a limited-edition Hershey’s Dubai-Inspired Chocolate Bar that adds green pistachio filling and kadayif pastry to a classic break-apart Hershey’s chocolate. They’re treating the release like a sneaker drop: only 10,000 bars are being released. [Photo: Hershey’s] “We don’t chase every trend, but this one was big enough, and there was an opportunity to do it in a Hershey way,” Dan Mohnshine, Hershey’s vice president of demand creation strategy and brand development, tells Fast Company. To make the bars, Hershey’s flew a small team to Italy to source pistachio and kadayif cream. The company reviewed nine formulas before deciding on the recipe they’re using, which was chosen for its balance of crunch and salt to complement the milk chocolate. “The ingredients and filling we developed are exclusive to the Hershey’s Dubai-inspired baryou won’t find this exact combination anywhere else,” Mohnshine says. The bars will be available for $8.99 at the Hershey’s Chocolate World Times Square on Thursday or online through Gopuff orders in New York City, Philadelphia, or Chicago. It was a roughly two-month process from late July to September to get the bar from concept to reality, and all 10,000 bars were produced in the company’s Hershey, Pennsylvania, research and development center. The candymaker has a “Velocity Lab” capability that Mohnshine says is “all about taking ideas to consumers quickly by embracing agility, an iterative mindset, and rapid prototyping based on trend signals.” For the Hershey’s Company, choosing when to jump on a trend depends on whether the candymaker believes it can provide a unique offering and value. Hershey’s is late to the food trend, which went viral on TikTok beginning in 2023. Shake Shack introduced a Dubai Chocolate Pistachio Shake in June, and Lindt and Ghirardelli released their takes on the trend in July and October, respectively. Demand for pistachio broke the supply chain. Still, that hasn’t hurt the company’s bottom line. As a limited-edition drop, Hershey’s Dubai-inspired bar is just a sugar rush in its overall sales. Though the company reported on its October earnings call that Halloween sales were disappointing, which CEO Kirk Tanner blamed in part on the day of week, it’s seen a 6.5% increase of consolidated net sales. Though just 10,000 bars will be released, Mohnshine says “never say never.” “We’re really excited to hear what our fans think about Hershey’s version of a Dubai-inspired chocolate bar,” he says.
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E-Commerce
Changing prices for what the market will bear has long been a staple of pricing for everything from airplane seats to a gallon of gas to hotel rooms. Indeed, an entire field of so-called dynamic pricing exists to figure out how to extract the most profit from the most willing customers has now emerged. But were at an inflection point now in which such practices are going from the exception, and for relatively few items, to the norm. The regulatory framework is at the moment right in the midst of figuring out what the guardrails will be. The Intermediary Industrial Complex Remember when a gallon of milk cost the same for everyone who walked into the store? That quaint notion is rapidly becoming as obsolete as the paper price tag itself. Retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and servicesfrom a person’s location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage. We’re witnessing the emergence of a pricing ecosystem where your browsing history, zip code, and even the speed at which you scroll through a web page can determine what you pay. Companies like Revionics, PROS, and Bloomreach are building the infrastructure for a world where pricing becomes as personalized as ones Netflix recommendations. The Federal Trade Commission found that the intermediaries worked with at least 250 clients that sell goods or services ranging from grocery stores to apparel retailers. This isn’t a niche practiceit’s becoming the operating system for modern commerce. Consider this scenario from the FTC’s findings: A consumer who is profiled as a new parent may intentionally be shown higher priced baby thermometers on the first page of their search results. This opens the door to algorithmic exploitation of vulnerability. When your recent searches reveal a sick child, the system is programmed to catch you at the moment youre likely to be least price-sensitive. The regulatory response is crystallizing around three distinct vectors. First, consumer protection law challenges the fundamental fairness of charging different prices to different people for identical products. The Robinson-Patman Act, dormant for decades, may find new life in addressing digital-age price discrimination. It was originally intended to help small vendors compete with large ones by forcing everybody to compete on the same playing field when it came to pricing, eliminating predatory pricing by large players. Second, those who support stronger privacy laws question whether using granular personal data for pricing decisions constitutes an unfair practice. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that predatory pricing is only possible because our privacy laws are so weak. Americans, they suggest, deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, for instance, charging higher prices to those already in the parking lot (as Target has been accused of doing) or to those with fewer alternative options, as Staples has been accused of doing. Third, antitrust concerns emerge as companies with the power and resources to engage in surveillance pricing may trigger competition concerns. Only the largest companies have sufficient data to perfect these systems, potentially creating insurmountable competitive moats. Further, the algorithms used to set prices can act as signals that allow firms to effectively collude, even if they dont do so explicitly. With everything else becoming dynamic, perhaps the era of fixed prices is over Here’s the strategic contradiction companies must navigate: The same data capabilities that enable personalized servicethe holy grail of customer experiencealso enable personalized exploitation. Every company talks about “customer-centricity,” but surveillance pricing reveals the tension between serving customers better and extracting maximum value from them. Forward-thinking companies might find competitive advantage in explicitly rejecting surveillance pricing. “Same price for everyone” could become the new “organic” or “fair trade”a trust signal that commands its own price premium. Costco’s membership model already embodies this principle: pay to enter a space where prices are transparent and universaland Costco has long set a ceiling on how much margin it extracts from its member-customers. We’re in a brief window where surveillance pricing is technologically possible but not yet legally constrained. Companies experimenting with these tools should assume that window will closethe only question is how quickly and how completely.
Category:
E-Commerce
Just before Fridays draw for the FIFA mens World Cup 2026 group stage, Visa is launching an artistic update to its sponsorship of the tournament. The brand just announced a new partnership with Pharrell Williams Joopiter auction and e-commerce platform, on a new World Cup-themed art collection, featuring 20 different artists from six continents. The collection aims to show how creativity drives commerceand how artists are the entrepreneurs shaping communities and culture around the world. Visa has unveiled the first five pieces in the collection at an exclusive Miami showcase called The Art of the Draw, hosted by multidisciplinary creator KidSuper. The showcase features the works of artists Darien Birks, Nathan Walker, Cesar Canseco, Ivan Roque, and Rafael Mayani. The rest of the collection is set to come before the tournament kicks off in June. Cesar Canseco [Image: courtesy Joopiter/Visa] Visa chief marketing officer Frank Cooper III says this collection embodies the brands overall approach of using its sponsorships to not just leverage the fan experience around an event like the World cup, but actually add to it. Darien Birks [Image: courtesy Joopiter/Visa] It’s allowing artists to do what they do best, which is to help us to see things differently and to provoke conversation in ways that may not get provoked through just casual interaction, says Cooper. So for me, this opens the aperture of how you can think about the World Cup and football. Ivan Roque [Image: courtesy Joopiter/Visa] Add value, not ads Visa first signed on as a World Cup sponsor back in 2007. This will be Coopers second tournament with the brand, having joined shortly before the 2022 World Cup. Nathan Walker [Image: courtesy Joopiter/Visa] Back in 2023, in one of his first interviews as CMO, Cooper told me that one of the things he really wanted to do around sponsorship was to move away from what he called cultural adjacency, borrowing equity and trying to get a halo off that, and creating awareness by being the proud sponsor of something. Im not dismissing that, he said. I think it has a role, but can we actually add value to fans, the athletes, or artists experience? Can we figure out ways that are less interruptive and more about creating momentum around things people want to do? Otherwise, you start to fade into the background and become wallpaper if people see it too much. There is value in traditional sponsorship, but theres more value in delivering something that would not happen unless we were there. Thats the playbook. Since then, Cooper has led the brand into music and sports, with a pre-Paris Olympics Post Malone concert at the Louvre, and Benson Boone at The Kennedy Space Centers Rocket Garden, as well as compelling projects in Formula 1, NFL, and the Olympics. Rafael Mayani [Image: courtesy Joopiter/Visa] The mindset that we have is less of, Can I interrupt an experience or insert ourselves into an experience in a way that disrupts people? And more of, Can I create original intellectual property that actually makes the experience better? he says. This is where supporting artists from around the world to create a collection that shows the connection between creativity and sports culture comes in. The Art of the Draw is just the latest piece of work Visa has done around next summers World Cup, and it wont be the last. So far, the brand has given its cardholders exclusive early access to World Cup tickets through its Visa Presale Draw back in September. In June, the brand opened the first of six soccer parks throughout the United States in San Francisco, in partnership with Bank of America and Street Soccer USA. And in September, Visa signed Barcelona and Spain star Lamine Yamal as a global ambassador. View this post on Instagram Logo Soup Major sports events like the World Cup have long been drenched in ads from sponsors, from logos on the field to exclusive products and services at the games. Cooper says there is still value in this type of traditional brand presence, but whats changed over the years is what else is required to give that presence value. What has changed is that there’s very little value given to just the pure advertisement, says Cooper. It becomes like logo soup. What is probably the most important thing is that fans are asking for the brands that they care about the most, who are connected to these events like the World Cup, to understand the cultural nuances. If you’re going to be involved, you better understand it. This is where the level of detail in a brands involvement, particularly in fan culture, is key. As Men In Blazers cofounder Roger Bennett told me in August, brands need to get involved in soccer early and often, in order to be more than a tourist at the World Cup in fans eyes. Cooper knows this, too. He knows the difference between churning out generic promo T-shirts for fans, and teaming with a local designer for a limited-edition drop. Thats also the strategy behind The Art of the Draw. What I’m seeing is that fans increasingly are really, really smart about which brands understand the cultural nuances of the activity that they’re engaged in, he says. And so what we are trying to do is become much more aware of those cultural nuances, how to tease them out, and how to produce something that actually delivers value in that context.
Category:
E-Commerce
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