The category's most underused lever.
Co-authored creator content returns one hundred to two thousand times the engagement of brand-owned posts across this category. This section identifies the creators driving that return, brand by brand, and the brands leaving the lever idle.
What the collaborations tell us
Creators out-earn brand content by 100 to 2,000 times
Set against each brand's own median, a co-authored post returned between 157 and 1,975 times the engagement. Juicy Drop earned 119,559 on a creator post against a median of 17 on its own.
Two creators carried the category
@ii6sm for Juicy Drop (119,559) and @mylove_skb for Borgat (74,668) produced the two largest results in the set, far ahead of everything else.
The lever is barely pulled
Brands that ran creators ran two to four posts in twelve months. Chupa Chups, Extra and Nova ran none on Instagram.
Fit beats volume
Haribo ran the most collaborations, nine, and earned the least, every one under 650 engagements. UAE food bloggers are not matched to a candy audience.
Shift budget from boosting brand-owned posts to a planned creator programme, briefed on proven engagement rather than follower count, and matched to a candy audience.
The collaborations that moved the needle
Top Instagram co-authored posts by engagement. Gold marks Skittles' sibling-brand cross-promotions on its global account, not regional creators.
Every collaboration, ranked
All co-authored Instagram posts in the window. Click a column to sort. Creator follower counts are not shown: the public data records the brand's count on these posts, not the creator's, so creator reach needs a separate profile pull.
Creators, brand by brand
Bazooka collaborates more often (three posts) but at smaller scale. Each still beat the brand's own median of 18 by more than a hundredfold.
- @bassam.78 — 5,185 engagements
- @rawandashh — 2,819
- @noor.unfltrd — 2,027
A single creator post carried Borgat's reach, against a median of 19 on the brand's own content. Two collaborations ran all year, leaving more room to scale creators than any brand in the set.
- @mylove_skb — 74,668 engagements
- @food_ksaa — 385
No Instagram creator collaborations in the window. Chupa Chups' Instagram is dormant, so the lever sits idle while its TikTok comments show clear Saudi demand.
No creator collaborations in the window. Extra has left organic Instagram entirely.
Haribo ran nine collaborations, the most in the set, all with UAE food bloggers. Every one landed under 650 engagements: volume without fit, with creators not matched to a candy audience.
- @editionsumair — 644
- @suheyee — 272
- @yummytreatuae — 137
- @simplyvoyager — 87
- @arshia_eatsnexplores — 67
Juicy Drop's creator posts are the strongest content in this report, set against a median of 17 engagements on the brand's own posts. Four collaborations ran in twelve months: the brand's best lever and its least used.
- @ii6sm — 119,559 engagements
- @basharkk — 32,671
- @may_dodaa — 747
Mentos's 2025 return runs entirely on creators. The brand published nothing solo in the window. The model works; the volume is three posts.
- @sultan_x220 — 2,402 likes
- @iocmz — two posts, about 3,700 combined
No Instagram creator collaborations in the window. Nova's traction is organic TikTok; a first creator test there is the obvious next step.
The Skittles handle in scope is the worldwide @skittles account, not a Middle East one, so its co-authors are global rather than regional: sibling Mars and Wrigley brands and US creators cross-promoting each other. This is not regional creator marketing, and the only regional Skittles handle provided, SkittlesArabia on YouTube, has been dormant since 2017.
- @twix — 4,789 (sibling brand)
- @snickers — 3,908 (sibling brand)
- @therealmrfantasy — 3,471 (US creator)
- @mmschocolate — 1,333 (sibling brand)
- @starburst — 838 (sibling brand)
