[Food Tech Acceleration] The Meeting of Food and Technology... 491 Trillion KRW Growth by 2025

Global Food Tech Market Expected to Grow to 491 Trillion KRW by 2025
Domestic Online Platforms Lead with Fast Delivery and High Market Share
Recently, D2C Businesses Offering Customized Products and Services Rapidly Emerging
AI and Robots Increasingly Utilized in Food Tech Industry

The global food tech market, including smart farms, is expected to grow to 491 trillion won by 2025.

[Asia Economy Reporter Koo Eun-mo] The food industry is embracing innovative technologies and accelerating the pace of change. Foodtech, which combines food with technology, is permeating the food industry in all directions?from plant-based alternative meats to dawn delivery and smart farms?acting as a new growth engine.

According to the Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corporation and others on the 6th, the global foodtech market, which was around $211 billion (approximately 288 trillion KRW) in 2017, grew to $238 billion in 2019 and expanded further to $272 billion last year. The growth trend of the foodtech market is expected to continue steadily, with projections reaching $311 billion in 2023 and $360 billion (approximately 491 trillion KRW) by 2025.

Foodtech is a compound word of food and technology, referring to technologies that integrate artificial intelligence (AI), information and communication technology (ICT), biotechnology (BT), and more into the traditional food industry to create more advanced forms of industry and added value. Although the term itself may be somewhat unfamiliar, foodtech has already deeply penetrated our daily lives. Ordering food via mobile devices, plant-based alternative meats, and agricultural production using smart farms all fall within the realm of foodtech.

Since foodtech broadly refers to various products, services, and related businesses that apply new technologies to the food industry, its scope is wide. Among them, the largest share of the domestic foodtech industry so far is the food trading business through online platforms. According to Statistics Korea and others, the scale of online food transactions in South Korea, which was about 13.154 trillion KRW in 2017, grew by 334% over four years to approximately 57.089 trillion KRW last year.

The introduction of fast delivery services, such as same-day and dawn delivery, which allow consumers to receive fresh food quickly, has been a decisive factor in the growth of the online food market, including online grocery purchases and food delivery services. The growth of the online food market has also influenced the acceleration of adopting the latest technologies such as packaging and quality preservation systems to maintain food freshness.

Fast delivery services such as dawn delivery, which have become a growth factor for the domestic online food trading business.

Recently, D2C (Direct to Consumer) businesses, which minimize distribution stages and trade directly with consumers, have rapidly emerged as new platform businesses. These services are evaluated as mutually satisfying because they collect consumer purchase data through their own malls to provide customized products and services, while consumers can purchase fresh products at lower prices.

AI and robots are also increasing their utilization within the foodtech industry. As consumer demands diversify, food companies are increasingly using big data to identify customer complaints and adopting review analysis platforms to systematically apply improvements and development in product stages. In the dining industry, autonomous robots equipped with serving, clearing, and patrolling functions have appeared to address issues such as the normalization of contactless service and rising labor costs.