Coffee Market Exploding In South Korea

It is amazing how over the past two decades coffee has become such a staple of Korean culture.  It is good to see that the convenience stores are now also offering quality brewed coffee considering how expensive most of the coffee shops are:

Koreans love their coffee – but they’re loving it in different ways.

The market was once dominated by franchise coffee shops like Starbucks and the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, but more people are heading to convenience stores, especially since they started selling quality coffee at low prices.

Local convenience stores such as CU, GS25 and 7-Eleven are aggressively expanding their offerings of brewed coffee. Korean adults consumed an average of 341 cups of coffee in 2014, up 14.4 percent from the previous year, according to Statistics Korea. To put that into perspective, the average Korean consumed seven bowls of rice a week, 11.8 portions of kimchi – and 12.8 cups of coffee. Coffee has arguably become more important than kimchi.

Industry insiders believe that the coffee market was worth about 6 trillion won ($5.06 billion) last year and that it has been growing 10 percent per year. Convenience stores’ coffee sales accounted for about 40 billion won last year, but that is expected to grow to 100 billion won this year.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

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