The Buldak Boom, Seen From a Rival's Desk

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 glamorous end of the food business. Nobody has ever filmed a challenge video about soy sauce.

But the industry here is small, and people talk. Lunch is where you find out what is really going on at the other companies. Who is hiring. Who stopped paying bonuses. Who is quietly in trouble.

Some of the people I worked with had come to us from Samyang Foods.

"That place is finished"

That was the general view, and it wasn't gossip. It was a reasonable read of the situation.

Samyang made the first instant ramyeon in Korea. At one point they had something close to seventy percent of the market, which is a number that sounds made up now. Then came the 1989 industrial tallow scandal. They were cleared in court eventually, but the case dragged on for nearly six years, and by the time it ended their share had fallen into the teens. It never really recovered. By 2013 they had dropped to third, behind Ottogi.

So nobody was surprised when people from Samyang turned up at our company. That is what happens at a company that is shrinking. People leave.

What none of us knew — and they didn't know either — was that the thing that would save that company was already on shelves. It had launched in April 2012.

Then it went the other way

I can't tell you the month. I want to say it was around 2015 but honestly I could be off by a year in either direction. What I remember is the feeling that something was out of order.

People started leaving us for Samyang.

Not a wave. One person, then another one. It's a small thing and easy to miss if you aren't paying attention. But when you have been around an industry long enough, which way people are moving tells you more than any market report. Money and confidence go first and people follow. Nobody transfers into a dying company.

When I asked, the answer was simple enough. Samyang was hiring, and hiring hard. Buldak was selling. They were expanding and they needed bodies.

That is how I found out. Not from an article. From a colleague explaining why he was handing in his notice.

Then the news caught up

Buldak had been picked up on YouTube. Foreigners filming themselves eating it and going red in the face. The Korean Englishman channel put out a video. Then everybody was making one.

Samyang have been fairly open about the fact that none of this was the plan. The videos came first and the marketing strategy came after. Sit with that for a second. The most successful Korean food export of the last decade was not thought up in a meeting room. It happened to them.

After that the numbers did what you would expect. Exports went from around 30 billion won in 2015 to 93 billion the following year. Revenue had been about 300 billion won in 2013; by 2023 it was 1.19 trillion. In May 2024 their market value passed Nongshim for the first time in thirty years, which for anyone who remembers the ramyeon market in the 2000s is genuinely hard to believe.

But I want to be careful about the order things happened in, because every article I have read about K-Food flattens it.

The people moved first. The numbers came after that. The news came last, by a long way. By the time Buldak was something we talked about over lunch in our own office, it was old information to anyone who had been watching where people were going.

What it did to the rest of us

You might assume a competitor's viral hit is their problem. It isn't.

The instructions came down fast and they were not subtle. We have to move on exports, and 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 saw coming, and a few weeks later it is a line on your own team's target sheet.

Our direction did change, and not only on paper. We had been working Europe, Spain especially. That got shelved. We shifted weight to the United States and put serious resources behind it.

I don't think Buldak alone caused that decision. But it had proved something the industry had never managed to prove before. A Korean product could sell to people with no connection to Korea at all. Before that, most of what we exported went to Korean grocery stores abroad, bought by Koreans who were homesick. You can only grow that so far. Buldak showed the wall wasn't where everyone thought it was.

Ramyeon opens the door. Sauces come in behind it. Somebody tries Korean noodles, likes them, and sooner or later wants to cook something Korean at home, and then they need gochujang, and then soy sauce. We were at the back of that queue. But the queue had started moving.

We never made our own Buldak

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

We didn't do it. Nobody did. You can't sit in a meeting room and decide to produce a phenomenon, especially one that wasn't planned the first time round.

What we got was smaller. Real, but smaller. Our overseas business grew enough that it got written about, which for a soy sauce company is not nothing. It wasn't a transformation. It was a decent result for a lot of work.

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 this industry.

San Diego

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

He told us he had seen our soy sauce in a shop there. Our seaweed too.

That was it. No press release, no export figure, nothing in a quarterly report. A colleague walked into a store in a city where we knew nobody, and there it was on the shelf.

I remember thinking, alright. It worked. Some of it worked.

Twenty-three years in Korean companies and that is still the moment I come back to. Not any target we hit. Somebody standing in an aisle seven thousand miles away, looking at a bottle we had put on a boat.

Which is where this blog got its name.