'National Snack' Sold 1.6 Trillion Won Over 40 Years... 3 Billion Bags Produced

No.1 Corn Snack Market with Annual Sales of 80 Billion KRW

Lotte Wellfood (formerly Lotte Confectionery)'s 'Kkokkalcorn' has celebrated its 40th anniversary since its launch. Since its release in 1983, Kkokkalcorn has firmly maintained its position as the number one corn snack in Korea, with total sales exceeding 1.56 trillion KRW as of last year.

According to Lotte Wellfood on the 30th, the cumulative sales of Kkokkalcorn from its launch in 1983 until December of last year totaled 1.565 trillion KRW over 39 years.

Kkokkalcorn recorded sales of about 3 billion KRW in its first year, 1983, and in the following year, 1984, sales doubled to 7 billion KRW. Since the 2000s, it has consistently achieved sales in the range of 40 to 50 billion KRW, and from 2015 to last year, it has maintained annual sales of around 80 billion KRW. When converting the sales volume of Kkokkalcorn over 39 years into the number of bags, it amounts to approximately 3 billion bags. If lined up in a row, they would circle the Earth about 18 times.

Kkokkalcorn was born in May 1982 through a technical partnership between Lotte Confectionery and the American company General Mills. To produce Kkokkalcorn, Lotte established a large-scale production plant in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province in 1983, and began full-scale production in September of the same year.

Kkokkalcorn initially launched with a savory flavor. Since then, various new flavors such as roasted corn and spicy-sweet have been developed. The savory and roasted corn flavors are loved by a wide range of consumers from children to middle-aged adults, while the spicy-sweet flavor is known to be preferred by people in their 20s and 30s. Among the Kkokkalcorn series, the products with the highest sales proportions are the savory and roasted corn flavors. Combined, these two products account for about 60% of total sales.

The earliest Kkokkalcorn featured dual packaging with different outer and inner packaging. The outer packaging was a hexagonal prism-shaped paper wrapper, and the inner packaging was polyethylene. In the 1990s, as the performance of vinyl packaging improved and printing technology advanced, the packaging material was changed to the current type.

The popularity of Kkokkalcorn continues to this day. As of the first quarter of this year, Kkokkalcorn's estimated sales amount to about 20 billion KRW. This is about a 5% increase compared to the same period last year, and with the lifting of COVID-19 social distancing measures leading to more outings and increased sales during the peak season after May, sales performance is expected to increase by about 10% compared to the previous year by the end of the year.

A representative from Lotte Wellfood said, "There are many long-selling products in the snack market, but products that have achieved cumulative sales of over 1.5 trillion KRW are rare enough to count on one hand," adding, "Kkokkalcorn is well-suited to be called the 'national snack.'"