Taste stopped selling Korea's ready meals, so retailers are buying prep time and price instead

GS25 says its Hyeja-roun value line passed 100 million cumulative units by April, about three years after its relaunch ^[10]. Run that out and it is roughly 91,000 units a day ^[2]. Kurly's Charyeonaen, the online equivalent, needed nine months to clear its first million ^[11], or about 3,650 a day ^[3], one twenty-fifth of the convenience-store pace ^[4]. Same stated strategy, same price-led pitch, very different physics. The cheap-and-easy race is being won where the chiller is within walking distance, and an online grocer has to manufacture its volume some other way.

SSG.com is manufacturing it with merchandising cadence. Since June it has rotated a fresh set of cheap, easy-to-cook items every two weeks, wrapped them in discounts, and attached cooking clips of under a minute plus suggested add-on products ^[5]. The headline result, according to SSG.com, is that featured items sold an average of 291% more than in the week before each promotion ^[6]. That mostly prices the discount, since the comparison week carried none ^[5]. The smaller figure is the one that says something new: recommended companion items rose 72% ^[7], about a quarter of the flagship move ^[6], and that part reflects basket-building rather than the markdown.

The survey explains why the money goes here at all. Convenience of cooking and storage is the most cited reason to buy, at 43.1% ^[2]. Costing less than buying ingredients and cooking from scratch comes second, at 31.8% ^[3]. The top reason for not buying is high prices, at 37.9% ^[4]. Those last two answer different questions, so the 6.1-point gap ^[5] is not a net, but the ordering is usable: price is the single strongest objection in the category while thrift is only the second strongest attraction. A discount answers the objection. A one-minute video answers the attraction. Better seasoning answers neither, which is the point when taste and quality have broadly leveled out ^[13].

The category is large enough to fund both moves. Growth averaging 14.1% a year since 2015, per the Korea Rural Economic Institute survey released on the 22nd ^[1], compounds to roughly a 3.7-fold increase over ten years ^[1]. That is how a bakery item wins a category on grams per won: SSG.com's 600-gram Slab Bread, developed with Nulldam and promoted in the 7,000-won range, topped bakery sales during its run ^[8], about 11.7 won a gram ^[7]. CU's Deukten line, launched in February at around 3,000 won and pitched as faithful to the basics ^[9], is the same argument in a smaller box. Grams per won is a spec sheet, and spec sheets are how commodities get sold.