About

 I spent twenty-three years inside Korean companies.

I started at Doosan, moved to a furniture company, left for LG, then went back to the same furniture company. After that came ten years in food — soy sauce, fermented pastes, the kind of thing that sat on Korean tables long before anyone called it K-Food. My last year was at a company that made gym equipment. I finished as a sales team leader.

I never cooked the food or designed the product. I was the one who worked out how much we would sell, to whom, at what price, and what to do when the money did not come in.

That is what this blog is about. Not recipes, not travel tips. What actually happens inside a Korean company — how a product gets approved, how an export target lands on someone's desk, why a brand shows up in one country's grocery aisle and not another's, and what a Tuesday looks like when a client stops paying.

I write anonymously. Some of the people in these stories are still in the industry, and a few would recognise themselves. Names, dates and numbers are blurred on purpose. Everything else happened.

Aisle 7 is where the Korean food usually sits in a foreign supermarket, somewhere between the noodles and the sauces. It took a lot of people a long time to get it there.

— James