Frustrated foodies gobble up grocery unicorn
seoul: When Sophie Kim moved home to South Korea after 15 years in the United States, she couldn’t find anywhere to buy kale for her green juice. So she found a farmer, then built an app to help others seek out top-quality produce.
The next-day grocery delivery service Market Kurly that 38-yearold Kim founded is now one of South Korea’s most important startup unicorns, last valued at Us$3bil (Rm13.6bil) and set for an initial public offering by February.
Kim, a self-professed “foodie”, came up with the idea after she got tired of endlessly going from shop to shop to find the high-quality groceries she wanted in Seoul’s supermarkets.
But she knew the products were out there and began driving to South Korea’s agricultural heartlands to find them, for example visiting the famous meat market in Majang-dong to procure half a cow’s worth of beef, which she would then split with her co-workers.
“While I was trying to figure out why it was so difficult to have access to great quality, fresh food in Korea, I got to know some farmers and fishermen, and they had exactly the same issue of not being able to find customers,” she said.
Korean farmers “are proud of the fact that they can produce such nice quality products, but it is extremely difficult for them to get to the consumer”, she said.
It was a lightbulb moment when Kim realised “if we can make this work for both consumers and producers, it would probably be a breakthrough for the industry”.
Kurly customers can order rare beef, hand-made bread, or pick one of more than a dozen varieties of local, hard-to-find apples by 11pm and be guaranteed delivery by 7am the next morning.
Consumer convenience has proved key to the app’s success.
“It takes less than a day to go from harvesting to the consumer’s doorstep,” said farmer Hwang Hansoo.