SEOUL, Aug. 31 (Korea Bizwire) — With consumers facing greater options for cheap and quick coffee, instant coffee brands like Maxim and Nestlé have scrambled in recent years to adapt to the increasingly competitive industry. A joint report by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corporation [...]
SEOUL, June 5 (Korea Bizwire) – Paul Bassett – a coffee franchise named after an Australian barista – has just celebrated the opening of its 80th coffeehouse in South Korea. Operated by M’s Seed, a Maeil Holdings affiliate, the franchise was launched in September 2009 introducing “specialty coffee,” a concept that was unfamiliar to locals [...]
SEOUL, May 24 (Korea Bizwire) – South Koreans drank a total of 377 cups of coffee per person on average last year, mirroring brisk growth of the sprawling market fueled by a flurry of various franchises, a government report showed Wednesday. The average coffee consumption, based on South Koreans aged over 20, has grown at [...]
SUWON, South Korea, April 5 (Korea Bizwire) – One of the biggest challenges for prospective restaurant and café owners is to pick the right spot. The Gyeonggi Provincial Government has decided to provide some insight for these candidates to help them make the best decisions using local big data. The data, relating to 5,517 commercial [...]
SEOUL, March 16 (Korea Bizwire) – Starbucks Coffee Korea, the local unit of the U.S. coffee giant, said Thursday that its annual sales topped the 1 trillion won (US$884.17 million) mark for the first time ever last year after its first shop opened here in 1999. Starbucks Coffee, which is operated by retail conglomerate Shinsegae [...]
SEOUL, Feb. 23 (Korea Bizwire) – The popularity of Pokémon GO is gradually waning, but there are still millions of players flicking their fingers on their smartphone screens trying to “catch’em all.” During the second week of February (February 6 to 10), an estimated 5.63 million people played Pokémon GO, which was a drop from [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 5 (Korea Bizwire) – One particular social trend finding prominence in 2016 was the “do-it-yourself” movement. In a society that places high importance on group activities, and emphasizes that everything be done “together,” the concept of dining alone, studying alone, or even drinking alone, seemed alien in the past, and these types of [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 17 (Korea Bizwire) – Food and snack companies are reaching out to consumers through face-to-face encounters at cafes and restaurants, and reaping multiple benefits of upgrading their company image, testing new products and increasing sales, industry officials said Thursday. Binggrae in March gave its Banana-flavored Milk, a product that has survived for 40 [...]
SEOUL, Nov. 7 (Korea Bizwire) – If there’s one thing about Korean culture that foreigners may find interesting, it could be the country’s nightlife. Koreans not only work late hours, but are seemingly most active at nights, and there are few city neighborhoods without 24-hour franchise cafés or restaurants on standby for late-night customers. A [...]
SEOUL, Oct. 18 (Korea Bizwire) – As of early next year, it will be difficult to open a coffee shop franchise in an area designated as “Seoul Forest Avenue”, which is now undergoing gentrification, the process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to the middle class, leading to the [...]