Nongshim, the ‘Parasite’ food maker, aims big in US

Nongshim Co., South Korea’s largest instant noodle maker, is a beneficiary of the success of the Oscar-winning film Parasite as well as the outbreak of COVID-19.

The domestic sales-oriented food maker is now better known as the brand of Chapaguri, a combination of its black soy bean sauce noodle Chapaghetti and the hot spicy noodle Neoguri. The made-up food went viral as the snack noodles featured in the comic thriller released in 2019.

It also emerged as an ideal self-quarantine meal during the pandemic, driving Nongshim’s global sales sharply higher.

In the first quarter of this year, the food and beverage company posted a whopping 604.1% surge in operating profit in the US from the year previous, with revenues up 40.1%.

The figures sharply outpaced the 7.8% gain in domestic operating profit over the same period and the 12.3% increase in sales.  

The construction of its second US plant last year in Rancho Cucamonga, California added to the upward momentum, lifting its US production capacity by 70%.

“We will break ground on our third US plant in 2025,” Nongshim Chairman and Chief Executive Shing Dong-won said in an emailed message to its employees last week.

It is looking to build the plant in the Eastern US, Shin told shareholders in March, without specifying further.

This month, he marked his second anniversary as the leader of the group, founded by his late father Shin Choon-ho, a younger brother of retail-focused Lotte Group's late founder and honorary Chairman Shin Guk-ho.

“We will accelerate our global expansion with a focus on the US market."

Under the goals, the company of South Korea's signature Shin Ramyun noodles aims to treble its US sales each year by 2030, overtaking the No. 1 player Toyo Suisan Kaisha Ltd., which commanded half of the US instant noodle market in 2021.

Nongshim took up 25.2% of the US market, according to Euromonitor, a global data provider.

In 1980, the noodle and snack maker opened its first US office in San Francisco. In 2005, it started rolling out instant noodle dishes in the US, after launching its first US plant in Los Angeles the same year, primarily targeting Korean residents.

In the 2010s, it built its position as a premium brand to differentiate itself from low-priced Japanese noodles.

Nongshim is far ahead of its domestic rivals in advancing into overseas markets. The shrinking domestic market due to the declining birth rates has urged Korean food makers to go global.

At home, Nongshim, meaning farmer’s heart, is seeking to shed its old-fashioned image to appeal to millennials born in the 1980s and Gen Zers born between the late 1990s and early 2000.  

As part of such efforts, the 58-year-old company launched a vegan brand, Veggie Garden, in 2020, as well as a nutrition food brand Lifill.

Last year, it surprised the food market with the launch of its first-ever pop-up store to serve one of its popular noodle dishes.

To invigorate its corporate culture, Nongshim has done away with formal office dress codes and simplified its rank system from five levels to three.

In the Middle East, it will expand the smart farm business.

Write to Jong-Hyun Song and Kyeong-Je Han at scream@hankyung.com
Yeonhee Kim edited this article.