The Buldak Boom, Seen From a Rival's Desk
For about ten years I worked at a Korean company that made soy sauce and fermented pastes. Not the exciting part of the food industry. Nobody films a challenge video about soy sauce. But the food business in Korea is small, and people talk. Lunch is when you find out what is happening at the other companies. Who is hiring. Who has stopped paying bonuses. Who is in trouble. Some of my colleagues had come to us from Samyang Foods . "That place is finished" That was the general opinion, and it was not gossip. It was a fair reading of the situation. Samyang made the first instant ramyeon in Korea. At one point they held close to seventy percent of the market. Then came the 1989 industrial tallow scandal . They were cleared in court, but only after a legal fight that ran nearly six years, and by then their share had collapsed into the teens. It never really came back. By 2013 they had slipped from second place to third, passed by Ottogi . So when people from Samyang joined us, n...