CU Surpasses 10 Million Sales of Cookie Run Series

A customer is choosing Cookie Run series bread at CU.

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeon Jinyoung] CU announced on the 14th that its differentiated bread, the Cookie Run Kingdom collaboration series, recorded cumulative sales of 10 million units just nine months after its release earlier this month.

This means an average of 40,000 units were sold daily, and if all the Cookie Run series sold to date were lined up, they would stretch 1,600 km?enough to travel back and forth between Seoul and Busan twice.

In October last year, CU partnered with the mobile RPG Cookie Run Kingdom to launch the Cookie Run series, which includes popular characters’ Ttibutti Busil stickers and game item coupons. These products swept the top 1 to 5 spots in CU’s bread sales, boosting overall bread sales in the fourth quarter of last year by 21.2% compared to the previous year.

The Cookie Run series sparked a desire for character goods collection among the MZ generation (Millennials + Generation Z), with an event offering a Ttibutti Busil book to the first 4,500 customers who purchased the product selling out in just one day.

Posts about exchanging or selling Ttibutti Busil stickers have been posted daily on secondhand trading apps and communities, and the product ranked first in monthly searches on Pocket CU’s Hot Issue Product Finder, which helps locate popular product stocks by store.

Riding this wave of popularity, CU introduced the Cookie Run Kingdom collaboration Season 2 products in March this year. Season 2 doubled the product lineup and included 30 new Ttibutti Busil stickers not featured in Season 1, attracting intense interest from enthusiasts.

Notably, Season 2 of the Cookie Run series overlapped with the release period of Pok?mon bread, igniting a full-fledged fan culture and sparking a character bread syndrome.

In fact, CU’s bread sales in the first quarter of this year were at 28.0% compared to the previous year, but sales surged by a whopping 69.9% in the second quarter when Season 2 was launched. The average monthly sales of Season 2 products were 60.5% higher than Season 1, with a maximum daily sales volume reaching 120,000 units.

This popularity is led by the 20s and 30s age groups. Looking at sales proportions by age, those in their 20s accounted for the highest at 35.6%, followed by those in their 30s at 25.4%, and 40s at 18.8%. The iconic long-running mobile game Cookie Run has stimulated nostalgia among the MZ generation, fueling their desire to collect.

CU plans to renew the Cookie Run series, which has established itself as a blockbuster product, with Season 3 next month and organize abundant events to once again lead the character goods collection trend.

Lee Yonggu, MD of the Snack Food Team at BGF Retail, said, “The success of the Cookie Run series is the result of the perfect combination of a solid fan base for the content, excellent product quality, and the craze for collection culture, enabling us to achieve the monumental record of 10 million cumulative sales. Going forward, CU will continue to release collaboration products linked to popular content with high customer interest to provide differentiated fun and benefits.”