Five macro factors in aT’s 2016 report, and a 2035 projection left as a projection

Eating out, Yoo Ri-nara writes in 2016, is any meal away from home. In the past, the notes say, eating was mainly a matter of filling a meal; as industry grew and the economic environment changed, a richer era arrived and the dining-out industry began to develop. Consumers’ dining trends, Yoo Ju-yeon writes in 2009, change as fast as the industry itself, and a firm has to be able to read those changes if it is to meet a wider set of wants.

A 2016 domestic dining-trend report from the Korea Agro-Fisheries and Food Trade Corporation (aT) names five macro factors that affect the industry: the economy, population, industry and technology, distribution, and society and culture. On the economic side, 2016 is said to have brought heat waves, earthquakes, and typhoons, a spreading mood of protectionism around the world, and a stretch of low interest rates, low growth, and low prices. The average propensity to consume fell, and a turn toward the self, toward experience, and toward the present is said to have grown stronger. The Bank of Korea’s Financial Stability Report of December 2016, they record, shows growth in disposable income falling from 5.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015 (December) to 3.5 percent in the third quarter of 2016.

On population, Statistics Korea figures in the notes put one-person households at 4.21 million in 2010 and 5.20 million in 2015, a rise in share from 23.9 percent to 27.2 percent. The office is said to project that the share will reach 34 percent by 2035, Japan’s level of one-person households. That 2035 figure stays a projection as the notes present it, not a 2026 official total. Even four-person households, they add, have come to pursue a more individualized lifestyle, not unlike a one-person household. Industry and technology are said to have brought “keep-tech,” a quiet technology that gathers and analyzes information without fuss and offers tailored benefits, and a rise in attempts that use augmented and virtual reality to satisfy the five senses. In distribution, O2O services have settled in as a platform not only for services but for selling goods, and an on-demand system that forecasts demand and supplies accordingly is said to have spread. In society and culture, hobbies and tastes that let people try things for themselves have grown, the districts that support them have grown, and everyday life and leisure have become more personalized, with fragmented, individual values spreading at the expense of communal ones. The macro changes running through 2016–2017 are summarized as a low-growth economy, more one-person households, consumer-oriented technology platforms, on-demand distribution, and the spread of experience stores and personalized leisure.

The 2017 keywords: eating alone, half-eating-out, fast premium, and a reboot of modern Korean food

According to a survey of 2016 dining-out behavior and a 2017 dining-trend note issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and aT, the 2017 keywords are a boom in eating alone, a diversification of “half-eating-out,” fast premium, and a reboot of modern Korean food. Those labels stay tied to 2017 as the notes give them.

A boom in eating alone, they write, is a consumer era in which dining out by oneself becomes ordinary. Shorthand such as honbap, honsul, and honkeo — eating, drinking, or having coffee alone — is said to have become fashionable enough that a more leisurely culture of eating out by oneself was expected to spread further. “Half-eating-out” sits between eating out and eating at home. As packaged meals developed, and as surrounding tools such as delivery apps developed, a more upscale take-out culture, fitted to personal taste and spread across more kinds of business, was expected to take shape.

Fast premium names a rising wish for a meal that is simple and quick in form, yet healthy, substantial, and more refined. Lunch boxes and snack food, they write, were expected to develop in more upscale ways, at a distance from their older image. A reboot of modern Korean food is said to work through Korean buffets and fusion Korean cooking, through which a popularization of traditional Korean food is evolving, and through owner-chefs who mix Korean and foreign food and reread what Korean food had meant, so that a modern Korean cooking spreads more quickly.

Shop-floor cases, a 2016 lunch-box figure, and a Korea Ratings note on 2017

As people who eat, drink, or have coffee alone have increased, more firms, the notes say, have been changing interiors and sales systems to aim at them. Our Home, a general food firm, is said to have set out a separate straight bar in shops of its fast-casual brand Bap-i Dap-ida, so that hurried office workers could eat alone quickly. CJ Foodville’s Jeil Jemyeonso offered shabu-shabu, usually hard to eat alone, as a one-person menu, with more than thirty ingredients on a food rail and a personal induction hob. Bonggu Beer opened small shops aimed at people drinking alone, in central and outlying districts alike, with main items such as fries and cheese sticks at 2,500 to 3,000 won. Slow Village Brewery & Pub, a house-makgeolli brand, sold makgeolli by the glass rather than in the older one-liter unit, and is said to have raised sales among customers drinking alone. A Twosome Place and Paul Bassett, in some shops, sold simple snacks and draft beer. When single visitors reached about 30 percent of all customers, Droptop began work on bakery items and set menus at a price for one person. Hollys Coffee, aiming at people who come alone to study, increased one- and two-person seats in place of four-person ones, and fitted outlets, lamps, and partitions at each place, as a library shop — a point the notes take from Asia Today in 2016.

As a case of fast premium, they point to convenience-store lunch boxes. Not long before, those boxes were treated as a “calorie battery” for getting through a meal, and were criticized as loaded with sodium. More recently, in this telling, they have been accepted as a solid meal and have turned up in photographs on social media. Thanks to that change, convenience-store lunch boxes are said to have grown by nearly 200 percent in 2016 alone. The change is attributed to GS Retail, which launched a Kim Hye-ja lunch box, and to CU, which made a Baek Jong-won lunch box. That 200 percent figure stays a 2016 claim as the notes record it, not a later official total.

On tasks facing the industry as 2017 arrived, a report from Korea Ratings, they write, names an unfriendly business environment caused by weaker consumption and a prolonged downturn, and problems that come from regulatory effects that differ by type of business. The unique body does not carry the further detail promised after that sentence, and nothing later is invented here. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Notes on dining-out trends, using Yoo Ri-nara’s 2016 definition of eating out and Yoo Ju-yeon’s 2009 remark that trends change as fast as the industry.
2. aT’s 2016 domestic dining-trend report and its five macro factors; the Bank of Korea’s Financial Stability Report of December 2016 on disposable-income growth; Statistics Korea figures for 2010 and 2015, and a 2035 projection left as a projection.
3. 2017 keywords from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and aT; shop-floor cases from Our Home to Hollys; a nearly 200 percent 2016 rise in convenience-store lunch boxes; and a Korea Ratings note on 2017, with figures left in those years.

Last updated: 14 November 2026