Arya News - Choson Sinbo, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Japan, reported last month that researchers at Ryanggang University of Industry had developed chocolate made with “purple beans” instead of cocoa powder.
SEOUL – North Korea’s latest answer to chocolate does not start with cocoa.
Choson Sinbo, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Japan, reported last month that researchers at Ryanggang University of Industry had developed chocolate made with “purple beans” instead of cocoa powder.
The report said the technology had been registered as a North Korean patent and that the product had been put into production at a food factory in Ryanggang Province.
While the report touted the bean-based chocolate as an achievement, the more revealing point is not simply that North Korea lacks cocoa. It is that the country still wants something it can call “chocolate.”
Thus follows the logic of North Korean substitutes. They are not just pale imitations of foreign goods, but altered versions of the outside world that can be claimed as domestic.
North Korea has spent decades rejecting the outside world in public while quietly absorbing its shapes, tastes and symbols. A foreign snack becomes a local sweet cake. The smartphone becomes a domestic technology product. Cocoa becomes beans.
Some substitutes are born from hunger. Others are born from aspiration. Together, they show how one of the world’s most closed societies tries to manage not only shortages, but desire itself.
From fake meat to corn coffee
One of the best-known examples is injogogi, a meat substitute made from the residue left after extracting oil from soybeans.
The soybean-based food became widespread during and after the famine years of the 1990s, when many North Koreans had little access to real meat. Rolled into thin sheets and often eaten with rice or spicy sauce, it began as a survival food. Over time, the meat substitute became part of the country’s market food culture.
Coffee tells a different story.
Real coffee remains a luxury for many North Koreans, but the habit and image of coffee have proliferated. Grain-based drinks such as corn coffee have long served as cheaper substitutes, while North Korean-made instant coffee products have also appeared in cities in recent years.
Here, the substitute is not only about caffeine. It is about the gesture of drinking coffee, the image of modern urban life and the small comfort of participating in a ritual associated with the outside world.
When a snack becomes political
Then there is Choco Pie.
The South Korean snack — marshmallow between two layers of cake coated with chocolate — became one of the most symbolic foreign goods to enter North Korea through the now-shuttered Kaesong industrial park.
The complex, once seen as a bridge in inter-Korean relations, was shut down by Seoul in 2016 after North Korean nuclear and missile tests. For years, Choco Pies given to North Korean workers there were eaten, saved, traded and sold in markets.
They were more than snacks. To many North Koreans, the small, individually wrapped cakes came to symbolize how much more was available in South Korea.
For Pyongyang, the problem was not simply that Choco Pies came from the South. It was that North Koreans liked them so much.
A 2011 analysis by the US-based Korea Economic Institute described the snacks as popular not only among North Korean workers at the Kaesong industrial park, but also on the country’s black market. It cited reports that Choco Pies were traded in open-air markets and that some traders dealt only in the snack cakes.
North Korea later tried to replace the snack from the South with its own alternatives, including chocolate-coated rice cakes known as “chocolate sweet cake.” Such products could copy the shape and sweetness, but not the appeal that made the original politically sensitive.
Imitating modernity
The pattern extends beyond food.
North Korea has long promoted domestically branded smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices as achievements of local science and technology. State media has presented such products as signs of modernization, with names and designs that suggest a homegrown technology sector.
But outside analysis suggests the “domestic” label can be misleading.
A 2026 report by 38 North said the North Korean handsets it examined appeared to have been produced by Chinese original equipment manufacturers. The likely process, according to the report, was that the phones were manufactured in China, shipped to North Korea and then loaded with North Korean operating systems and applications.
That makes the smartphone different from food substitutes such as corn coffee or soybean meat.
A North Korean smartphone is not an imitation of something the country has never seen. Rather, experts say, it reflects Pyongyang’s attempt to copy a connected world without opening the door to it.
In that sense, a North Korean smartphone and cocoa-free chocolate belong to the same story. One removes the cocoa. The other removes the open internet. Both preserve the outward form of a global consumer good while stripping away the part that makes it foreign, uncontrolled or difficult to obtain.
Nam Sung-wook, a professor of North Korean studies at Korea University, said such substitutes should be read not only as signs of hardship, but also as political and social signals.
“North Korea presents them as proof of self-reliance, but they also reveal the limits of that self-reliance,” Nam said. “Behind each substitute is something the country cannot easily import, but also something its people have come to recognize and want.”