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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
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.
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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.
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E-Commerce
We Googled “Labubus.” We searched for beaded sardine bags, and recipes like cabbage boil and hot honey cottage cheese sweet potato beef bowl. We wanted information about Charlie Kirk and Zohran Mamdani, about Sinners, Weapons, and KPop Demon Hunters. We desperately needed to know why kids kept saying 6-7. Together, these queries defined 2025. The 24th edition of Googles Year in Search, the company’s annual top 10 lists of users most-searched items, debuted today. These hundreds of lists both validate our own obsessions and take us out of our own bubbles and echo chambers, offering insights into what our fellow humans are interested in. Year in Search is the flagship project from Google Trends, a relatively small global department within the company. Simon Rogers, a data journalist who helped build out The Guardians data visualization team in his native London before becoming Twitters data editor, has led the Trends team since 2015. In May, he will release a book, What We Ask Google, an epic snapshot, two decades long and counting, of our collective brain. Rogers spoke with me about the human effort behind Google Trends, what consistently surprises him about the data, and why it can be a source for hope in a dark time. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What is the role of the Google Trends division at Google? We are responsible for Year in Search. We also create content that shows up on the Trends sitewe’ve got some curated pages there, in addition to all our exploration tools. We work with NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and directly with newsrooms to get them data when they need it, often around big events. We do our own data visualization storytelling as well. Were not a big team. We’ve got people in the U.S., we’ve got some people in Europe, a couple of people in South America, and we have somebody in Australia. We are a mixture of analysts and people with data journalism backgrounds, like myself. I don’t think of us as a typical tech company analytics team. Thats not our job at all. We’re there to find the stories in the data, and the humanity. Its an enormous dataset, and its ever-changing. Its not static; it’s not like GDP [gross domestic product] figures or something that’s fixed at a certain point. Its constantly evolving and reacting to the world, as humans react to the world. You were on the cutting edge of data journalism at The Guardian, and in those early days, you said that data journalism is the new punk. Do you still think so? Part of the appeal for me was that it lowered the barriers for entry to creating content. Anybody could access data and data visualization tools, and make visuals. It had that in common with punk, which was about anybody picking up a guitar and setting up a band. One of the things that I love about Trends data is that it is publicly available; anybody can use it and make anything with it. Its probably the world’s biggest publicly available dataset. We don’t tell people what to do with it, which is why I think Google Trends has such a wide following. It’s not just journalists who use the site. It’s content creators. People working in NGOs. Marketers. Weve seen the UN use it in Afghanistan when the U.S. withdrew, and in Ukraine when the war started, to look at how refugees searched in certain areas. The Pew Trust did a report based on Trends data from Flint, Michigan, and how people searched around the water issues there. It’s incredibly versatile as a dataset, but it’s publicly available and it’s transparent. And that’s one of the things I feel really good about every day. [Screen grab: The Guardian] As technology advances, are people changing the way they engage with the data? Definitely. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development did an experiment where they would use Trends plus AI to generate weekly GDP figures, which are [usually] quarterly, and they wrote a paper on it. People are more data literate now than at any time in history, because of the amount of stuff that’s out there. But there’s a recognition that this data will tell you something about the world that you’re not going to get anywhere else. Because if you want to keep your finger on the pulse, this is literally the pulse. Is this thing you’ve built essentially just working in the background all the time? How much human work is involved? We can’t tell the data what to say. It’s a truly independent source. Trends is basically a sample of all searchesabout a fifth of all searchesand its a random sample. [The data] is anonymized and aggregated. What that means is that you can see a global level, country level, regional level, and city levelwhich is a town in Google geography. But no lower than that. We don’t have demographics. We just know when something happened, and how big it was as a proportion of all searches. Even on the site, you don’t see raw numbers of searches, because that wouldn’t tell you anything. It does give the ability to compare a small place to a big place, in the way that people search for stuff. Or you can compare San Francisco to New York. Youve written about how the data can show a lot of spikes in real time, but that those signals may not be as important as relative interest over time? Imagine an F1 race. The winners will be the top searches. But the acceleration would define whether something has trended or not. If something̱s a breakout, it means it’s trendedit’s increased by 5,000% over time. [We] just launched a Trending Now section on the Google Trends site, and you can see what’s trending every day on there, whether it’s a soccer match or the government shutdown. Those things will just automatically show up there. With Year in Search, we use trending as opposed to top search. Because if you look at the top searches on Google, theyre always the same. Its the weather. Its people typing YouTube into their search bar. But with things like KPop Demon Hunters, thats come from nowhere, spiked up, and it reflects the moment we were in. What does Google Trends tell us about how our attention spans have changed over the past few years? I don’t know that it reflects changes in attention spans, because were pretty ephemeral as humans. Part of the reason I did this book is because my mother died, and I found myself searching for a lot of things around dealing with grief. I could see that I was not alone. A lot of these things are constant, because they’re constants in our lives. We have kids, we have pets. We eat food. We want to help people. You [also] get these rhythmic searches. There are waves where, say, how to learn piano spikes ahead of Christmas, because people want to learn how to play piano for their holiday celebrations. Or certain health conditions, like [during] flu season. Hal Varian, who was the former chief economist at Google, wrote a paper on how there are a lot of economic factors that you can see spike in search before they show up in the official statistics. People searching for job seekers benefits will show up before jobless figures increase. But then there are things that just come and go. This year it’s Labubus or KPop Demon Hunters. Or the movie Weapons. If you were looking at Trends a few years ago, you would have seen a spike for searches in the Cups song [from] Pitch Perfect 2. Every teenager learned how to do the Cups song. Its kind of a snapshot of history, in a way. [Photo: Google Trends] When you compile these lists, do you see a big difference between whats trending in the U.S. and the rest of the world? Obviously, you get regional variationsif you’re looking for baseball, the U.S. is going to be tops. Some things are constant, like donations or helping or love. And then some things really vary, because of the conditions. For instance, I wrote in my book that you see spikes in searches for food from war-torn regions like Somalia or Ukraine. Refugees is more searched in countries where refugees go than in the countries where they originate from. I’m often curious about why something’s spiking in a certain place. Liverpool Football Club is more searched for in a town in Uganda than in Liverpool itself. There’s [also] a reflection of the spread of global culture. When you and I were growing up in England, promposals were not a thing, right? It was very much an American search, [where] you’d see a spike before prom every year. Now it’s a global phenomenon. It shows up everywhere . . . in Sweden, Germany, Australia. You sent me some of the 2025 lists, and Ive got to be honestI don’t know what half of these things are. Theres something on the Viral Products list that I had to look up: beaded sardine bag?! Do things surprise you, too? Luckily for us, my team is all younger, so everybody can explain stuff to me. This year in Year in Search, we’re planning to integrate AI mode explanations, so people click on a button and get caught up on what the trends are. You previously said that we’d never seen a year in search like 2020. Is that still true? 2020 was unique in a lot of ways. You saw these massive spikes as the economy reeled from COVIDthings like unemployment and food banks were at a high. It was an election year. There was a lot of news. All these things were just spiking much higher than they would have done a normal year. Things like vinyl LPs went up, and they stayed higher. Tequila, as well. We also saw a spike in loneliness, but also people searching for how to help. Those have kept increasing. We tend to think everything is terrible, people are terrible. But that’s not what you see in the way people search. Often, people are looking for how to help other people, or even how to improve the way they interact with other people. Do you have any expectations for search trends in 2026? Theres a revolution happening in the way we search stuff right now, in terms of the way AI is being used. You can see search changing through the data: queries are getting longer [and] much more specific. We’re almost doing a cognitive offload to AI; were asking quite complex things to get answers for. This year is the 24th Year in Search. It goes back to 2001, when it was called Google Zeitgeist. It was just a list. Now 74 countries around the world will have their own Year in Search. Tell me more about your book. It’s not a book about technology, but it’s about how we use it, and what that says about us. It’s about everyday searches. We talk about the sandwich generation, which is my age group where youre looking after your parents but also looking after kidsyou see that in search. Originally, I was going to call it something like Life Is Hard because it also reflects that we don’t know how to do a lot of things. One of the top food searches is how to boil an egg. Its a repeated search, which suggests that w’re repeatedly searching how to boil an egg. We need to be reminded of some of these things. When I was searching personally [about] grief, I felt quite alone. I could see from the data that I wasn’t, that there are loads of people doing the same thing. We worry about [a sense of] community and being part of a community. I think maybe we are part of communities; we just don’t always realize it. Whether it’s people who don’t know how to boil eggs, or people like me who search for weird Beatles recordings, or whatever it is. The boiled egg thing is real. Every time I boil an egg I’m, like, how many minutes again for hard-boiled? Yeah, and I must have boiled 500,000 in my life or something. Its kind of nuts. I’m just thinking now, if you were an alien who landed on Earth and you were only given Trends information, you could probably follow a story of humanity. I actually used that in my book! If everybody had gone away, you could tell who we were from the way we searched.
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E-Commerce
A few years ago, Tara Feeners career took an unexpected pivot. Shes spent nearly two decades working on creative tools for companies like Adobe, FiftyThree, WeTransfer, and Vimeo, and was content to keep working in that domain. But then the Browser Company came along, and Feener saw an opportunity to build something even more ambitious. Feenerone of Fast Companys AI 20 honorees for 2025is now the companys head of engineering, overseeing its AI-focused Dia browser and its earlier Arc browser. The browser is suddenly an area of intense interest for AI companies, and Feener understands why: Its the first stop for looking up information, and it’s already connected to the apps and services you use every day. OpenAI and Perplexity both offer their own browsers now, borrowing some Dia features like the ability to summarize across multiple tabs and interrogate your browser history. The Browser Company itself was acquired in September by Atlassian for $610 million, proclaiming that it would transform how work gets done in the AI era. Feener says her team has never felt more creative. We’ve never seen more prototypes flying around, and I think I’m doing my job successfully as a leader here if that motion is happening, she says. This Q&A is part of Fast Companys AI 20 for 2025, our roundup spotlighting 20 of AIs most innovative technologists, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and creative thinkers. It has been edited for length and clarity. Howd you end up at the Browser Company? [The Browser Company CEO] Josh Miller started texting me. We were both in that 2013 early New York tech bubble, we had a couple conversations, and he pitched me on the Browser Company. At first I couldn’t connect it to the arc of my career in creativity, but then it just became this infectious idea. I was like, “Wait a minute, I think the browser is actually the largest creative canvas of my entire career. It’s where you live your life and where you create within.” Why does it feel like AI browsers are having a moment right now? I really do believe that the browser is the most compelling, accessible AI layer. It’s the number-one text box you use. And what we do is, as youre typing, we can distinguish a Google search from an assistant or a chat question. In the future, you can imagine other things like taking action or tapping into other search engines. It basically becomes an air traffic control center as you type, and that’s going to help introduce folks to AI just so much faster because you don’t have to go to ChatGPT to ask a question. Thats part one. Part two is just context. We have all of your stuff. We have all of your tabs. We have your cookies. With other AI tools, the barrier to connecting to your other web apps or tools is still high. We get around that with cookies within the browser, so we’re able to just do things like draft your email, or create your calendar event, or tap into your Salesforce workflow. How do you think about which AI features are worth doing? I just see it as another bucket of Play-Doh. I never wanted to do AI for the sake of AI but for leveraging AI in the right moment to do things that would have been really hard for us to do before. A great example is being able to tidy your tabs for you in Arc. There’s a little broom you can click, and it starts sweeping, and it auto-renames, organizes, and tidies up your tabs. We always had ambitions and prototypes, but with large language models, we were able to just throw your tabs at it and say, “Tidy for me. With Arc, it was a lot about tab management. With Dia, we have context, we have memory, we have your cookies, so it’s like we actually own the entire layer. We leverage that as a tool for things like helping you compare your tabs, or rewriting this tab in the voice of this other tab, which is something I do almost every day. Being able to do that all within the browser has just been a huge unlock. Can you elaborate on how Dia taps into users browser histories? Browser history has always been that long laundry list of all the places you’ve been, but actually that long list is context, and nothing is more important in AI than context. Just like TikTok gets better with every swipe, every time you open something in Dia we learn something about you. It’s not in a creepy way, but it helps you tap into your browser history. Just like you can @ mention a tab in Dia and ask a question, like give me my unread emails, with your history you can do things like, Break down my focus time over the past week, or analyze my week and tell me something about myself given my history. We have a bunch of use cases like that in our skills gallery that you can check out, and those are pretty wild. In ChatGPT and other chat tools, it feels like you have to give a lot to build up that context body. Were able to tap into that as a tool in a very direct way. Some AI browsers offer agent features that can navigate through web pages on your behalf. Will Dia ever browse the web for you? We’ve done a bunch of prototypes and for us, the experience of just literally going off and browsing for you and clicking through web pages hasn’t felt yet fast enough or seamless enough. We’re all over it in terms of making sure we’re harnessing it at the right moment and the right way when we think it’s ready. We don’t want to hide the web or replace the web. Something I like to say about Dia is that we want to be one arm around you and one arm around the internet. And it’s like, how can we make tapping into your context in your browser feel the same way it would feel to write a document, or even just to create something with plain, natural language? I think that’s like the most powerful thing. Its like the same feeling I had when I was young and tapped into Flash, and that people had with HTML. With AI, literally my mom can write a sentence like, “turn this New York Times recipe into a salad,” and in some way she’s created an app that does some kind of transformation. And that just gets me really excited.
Category:
E-Commerce
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