Joining a food tech company in South Korea (3 months and still counting)
Did you know that South Korea’s traditional diet wasn’t originally meat heavy? This I didn’t know until I got into the food industry. So here’s my story how it all started.
First steps towards the rabbit hole
My story starts 5 months ago. I was still studying due to my recent bankruptcy building my startup and had to go back to college for my diploma. This is to at least get a decent job in the South Korea (Context Note: South Korea is of the countries with the most population of Ph.D graduates but also has a large unemployment rate for the same population).
During my quest for a diploma, I contacted with my close sunbae (University alumnae who is of higher batch than you) to have dinner with him and pick my brain on some issues on marketing their innovative product (anticlimactically mayonnaise). One thing became another then ended up offering me a job.
After a week of research and reorganizing my chaotic thoughts of joining the startup community again. I finally accepted the job and I ended up here, in the abyss of titans, the food industry.
The Risk
Joining / Starting a startup in the food industry is dead difficult. Large or established small companies tend to copy what works in the market thus making the first mover, especially a startup company, end up in bankruptcy. In addition to that it is a common practice in the food industry especially in Korea to be baptized with fire when you have a product that is popular among consumers. In layman’s terms, price wars are initiated by most incumbents to kill off their new competitors and take over the specific product.
Solution: Food Technology
Good news for me and the company where I work at The PlantEat, we are a food tech company that creates plant-based alternatives. This is a reaction towards the large demand for plant-based alternatives that tastes like the food that we currently eat. Habits are difficult to break, especially for food. So plant-based alternatives is like a buffer zone to help consumers to shift to a healthier alternative.
So in entering this specific market requires complex food technology to achieve products that most of the populations could love which means higher wall for new entrants in the market. So in our standards it’s a very good thing.
To further understand the benefits of this “food technology” in the food industry is simply thinking that these are patent-able technologies like the ones you patent in IT or normal “Tech” industry.
These technologies are patent-able in forms of production style, formulation, protein information and the like. There is a lot of potential in this part of the industry and I personally believe that soon enough the plant-based alternatives will be necessity for all humanity for a sustainable future.
Elon Musk was right, I am still chewing glass
“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.”
-Elon Musk
Yes, although I didn’t start the company myself, I as a part of this early stage startup I saw and experienced things that could likened to “eating glass”. It maybe regulations, other microbial issues that affects food that is composed of no preservatives. The worst is the wrong perception of plant-based food as “not tasty” in a meat heavy food culture in South Korea (i.e. Korean Barbecue)
Korean consumers’s basic food knowledge is mostly wrong. We don’t know the difference between Gene-editing and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), automatically judging them as “fraken-food” made by man or believing that we can’t get our proper protein from plant-based product and that we have to rely on red meat for our daily does of protein. (Now knowing that gladiators, in the roman era were vegetarian. I think this fact challenges our “traditional” perception of food and our lack of facts in our “knowledge” about food)
We could go deeper on this issue that I just talked about but this is a whole other debate/post by itself so moving on…
Bottom line is misinformation of the public consumer is proven difficult to change and proven to be very expensive to change.
The Good News, the alternative market
Not all is lost. With recent change in consumer perception of food safety and venture capital investing a lot into food tech alternatives. This is changing the food industry around the world. More and more plant-based and food tech companies are reaching Series-A funding and are gaining more traction from local consumers especially in the U.S. (to mention some of the popular companies: Impossible Foods, Beyond Foods, JUST(former Hampton’s Creek) and many more)
With these news and trend. We are proud to say that our patented food production technology have peaked interests from a lot of companies and currently growing faster than we expected compared to a year ago.
To end this post, I truly believe that the food industry is going to through drastic changes and I am happy that I am part of this revolution that would affect billions of people around the world in years time.
