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, nobody was surprised. That is what happens at a company that is shrinking. You leave.

What none of us knew, and what they did not know either, was that the product which would rescue that company had already been sitting on shelves since April 2012.

Then the direction reversed

I cannot tell you the exact month. What I remember is noticing that something was out of order.

People started leaving us for Samyang.

Not many. One, then another. It is a small thing, easy to miss if you are not paying attention. But when you have been in an industry long enough, the direction people move in tells you more than any market report does. Money and confidence move first, and people follow. Nobody transfers into a dying company.

When I asked, the answer was straightforward. Samyang was hiring, and hiring hard. Buldak was selling. The company was expanding and they needed people.

That is how the news reached me. Not from an article, not from a report. From a colleague explaining why he was handing in his notice.

Then the news caught up

Buldak had been picked up on YouTube. Foreigners were filming themselves eating it and reacting to it. A channel called Korean Englishman put out a video. Then everyone was making one.

Samyang have been open about the fact that none of this was their plan. The viral spread came first and the marketing strategy came afterwards. That is worth sitting with for a moment. The most successful Korean food export of the last decade was not engineered in a meeting room.

Once it started, the numbers moved the way you would expect. Samyang's exports went from roughly 30 billion won in 2015 to 93 billion won in 2016. Company revenue, which had been around 300 billion won in 2013, reached 1.19 trillion won by 2023. In May 2024 their market capitalisation passed Nongshim's for the first time in thirty years.

But I want to be exact about the order of events, because this is the part that gets flattened in every article about K-Food.

The people moved before the numbers did. The numbers moved before the news did. By the time Buldak became a lunch table topic in our own office, the story was already old to anyone who had been paying attention to who was hiring.

What it did to the rest of us

You might think a rival's viral hit is somebody else's business. It is not.

The instructions came down quickly, and they were not subtle. We have to move on exports, and move now. We need our own Buldak. Marketing and R&D need to get on this.

Anyone who has worked in a Korean company will recognise that sequence. A competitor does something nobody predicted, and within weeks it has become a line on your own team's target sheet.

Our direction did change, and not only on paper. We had been working Europe, Spain in particular. That shifted. We moved our weight to the United States and put a serious amount of capability behind it.

I do not think that decision came down to Buldak alone. But Buldak had proved something nobody in the industry had managed to prove before: a Korean product could sell to people with no Korean connection at all. Until then, most export volume went to Korean grocery stores abroad, bought by Koreans who missed home. That is a market with a ceiling. Buldak showed there was no ceiling.

Ramyeon opens the door and sauces walk in behind it. Someone tries Korean noodles, likes them, and eventually wants to cook something Korean at home. Then they need gochujang. Then they need soy sauce. We were near the back of that line, and the line had started moving.

We never made our own Buldak

I should be honest about how the rest of it went.

We did not do it. Nobody did. You cannot sit in a meeting room and resolve to produce a phenomenon that was never planned in the first place, and Samyang themselves have said the spread came before the strategy.

What we got was smaller. Real, but smaller. Our overseas business grew enough that it was written about, which for a soy sauce company was not nothing. It was not a transformation. It was a decent result after a great deal of effort.

Every article you read about K-Food is written about the company that won. I was at one of the others. So was almost everyone else in the industry.

San Diego

A colleague from our legal team was on secondment in the United States, in San Diego.

He told us he had seen our soy sauce in a store there. Our seaweed as well.

That was all. No press release, no export figure, no line in a quarterly report. A colleague walked into a shop in a city where we knew nobody, and our products were on the shelf.

I remember thinking: alright. It worked. To some degree, it worked.

More than twenty years in Korean companies, and that is still the moment I go back to. Not a target we hit. Not a number in a presentation. Somebody standing in an aisle seven thousand miles away, looking at a bottle we had shipped.

That is what this blog is named after.