Food culture speaks to a nation’s identity, culture, and society. Kimchi, for instance, is a fermented napa cabbage with spicy and sour flavors that is commonly served as a side dish. The process of making kimchi, known as kimjang, commonly occurs at the beginning of winter because kimchi was originally made as a survival food for the cold season. Currently, it is an everyday food and has been inherited as an eating habit within Korean society. Kimchi represents the identity of Koreans as a nation.
Pham (2013) argues that kimchi ‘serves as a globally recognizable marker of Korean national identity compared to national flags, national anthems, or even Hangul writing system’. Hence, foods, and to a larger extent national cuisines, are an entry level to learn the differences or commonalities of one’s own culture with another (Cwiertka, 2014;
Spence, 2016).
For South Korea, kimchi represents the authenticity of Korean food culture. The kimchi making process follows recipes that have been passed through generations. In
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1996, the so-called Kimchi War (Kimchi Jeonjaeng) began when Japan tried to add Kimchi as one of the official Japanese foods at the Atlanta Olympics. Japan has continued to produce its kimchi as well as coordinate exports of instant kimchi.
However, their Kimchi did not represent the original taste of kimchi because it had a different flavor due to a different fermentation process. South Korea proposed adding a standardized recipe for kimchi to the Codex Alimentarius Commision in response, and won the case by successfully owning the international standard kimchi recipe (Cwiertka, 2014).
As the next step, the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Official Korea Tourism Organization have been highlighting South Korea as the home country of kimchi (KFPI News, 2012). The country holds the annual World Kimchi Festival every November, where Koreans gather and participate in kimjang to make large amounts of kimchi. One major achievement from this was when kimchi was recognized by UNESCO as a World Intangible Cultural Heritage on December 5, 2013.
As such, food is one of the country’s national brands. Similar to K-Wave, K-Food is another South Korean brand that deserves to attain global recognition. The efforts in attaining global recognition of kimchi has made it a South Korean culinary brand that recently has become a food trend among millenials who strive for healthy food despite the pungent smell (Fifield, 2017).
Korean food culture is South Korea’s soft power. As a culture, soft power works when it upholds the potential of attractiveness to others (Nye, 2008). As much as other attractive South Korean resources can attract international audience, the positive response toward Korean food abroad is one opportunity to raise international awareness of South Korea.
In terms of national branding, although the position did not move to 15th in the NBI ranking, South Korea’s place has moved from 33th in 2008 to 27th in 2011 since the launch of GHC. The measurement based on As Anholt’s previous argument that the 9
9 GFK Group. America Remains the Most Admired Country Globally in the 2010 Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index(SM). Retrieved September 5, 2019 from
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branding strategy in culture such as food does bring more impact to South Korea’s national brands (Pham, 2013).
According to a ministry survey conducted in South Korea, the awareness of Hansik among New Yorkers has risen from 24.2% in 2011 to 64.3% in 2016 during the globalization project (Lee, 2017). The survey was conducted annually up until more recently, in 2018, KFPI sent a team to conduct the 2018 Global Food Consumer Survey in 16 countries around the world to measure how much the locals recognize Korean food. Of the total 6900 participants, 54.0% recognized Hansik, which constituted half of the total demographic (see Figure 9).
Figure 9. The 2018 Global Food Consumer Survey Source: KFPI
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Figure 10. 2018 Global Food Consumer Survey: Trends of Korean Food Awareness in 10 Existing Cities by Year
Source: KFPI
However, the result also shows that the percentage of Hansik recognition decreased among the total participants in the 10 cities from 64.1% in 2017 to 53.2% in 2018 (see Figure 10). After further interviews with the participants, the institute stated that the decrease was due to the competitiveness with South Korea’s brand K-pop.
K-pop’s spread worldwide has made it more recognizable as a global trend from South Korea than food. In this survey, people mostly argued that they knew more about K-pop compared with Hansik after being asked ‘to what extent do you know Hansik? (hansig-e daehae eolmana algo iss-eoyo? 한식에대해 얼마나 알고있어요?)10’
10 The data retrieved from the final report of the 2018 Global Food Consumer Survey completed in October
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Figure 11. The 2018 Global Food Consumer Survey: Global Korean Food Satisfaction 2018
Source: KFPI
Nonetheless, the result of the same demographics revealed an increased percentage in terms of satisfaction. In 2018, among the same participants, 89.9% had visited Korean restaurants (PR Team of KFPI), and 93.9% of participants who had experience eating Korean food were satisfied with Korean food, which was 10.7%
higher than the result of the 2017 survey (see figure 11). In a more recent achievement of GHC, a growing number of restaurants have been awarded Michelin stars, from zero restaurants in 2010 to 15 restaurants in 2018, such as Layeon, Gaon, Kwon Sook-soo, Bichae, and Gem. (Management Planning team of KFPI). These types of events have helped modernize Hansik to a global standard and improve Korea’s image among foreign consumers.
Similar to popular brands such as anime and manga from Japan, the utilization of K-Wave’s popularity as a communication strategy for GHC has also brought impact in raising awareness of K-Food. In other words, K-Food has become anew type of K-Wave (KFPI News, 2012). This statement is validated by the survey on the status of Korean
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culture in 2019. The results indicated that ‘Hansik ranked first (43.2%) as the most popular Korean cultural content, the second is K-Beauty (40.1%), and the third is fashion (35.6%)’ (Park Seung-kyu).
These achievements are not only helpful to measure foreign public awareness toward Hansik, but also useful to quantify the acceptance of Hansik flavor among foreign public’s palate.