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| Bibigo's Korean food items are contained in a cart at a large discount store in the United States in this 2020 file photo. Korea Times file |
By Kim Jae-heun
CJ CheilJedang, Korea's largest food company by sales, is considering chicken as its next strategic product to succeed its popular frozen dumplings, which helped its Bibigo brand's global sales surpass 1 trillion won ($768.3 million) in 2022, company officials said Monday.
Bibigo is a CJ's food brand under which the company has been launching a series of products in overseas markets. About 40 percent of Bibigo's revenue comes from selling frozen dumplings in the United States.
"We are developing new chicken items currently, but we will target the domestic market first. We will introduce different products for different countries to satisfy the local palates," a CJ CheilJedang official said.
The new chicken products being developed by CJ are expected to be drumsticks and wings, similar to popular fried chicken items seen locally.
The company will maintain the concept of frozen food for its chicken products because of the convenience of storage and shipment for overseas markets. Though, it will improve the food quality to make it taste similar to food served at a restaurant but rather when cooked in an air fryer at home.
One of the reasons CJ CheilJedang chose chicken as its next "hot" product is because it is the most popular food in the United States and currently its biggest overseas market. The company expects that chicken product exports will increase faster than that of dumplings as Bibigo brand awareness in the US has increased after its official sponsorship of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team began in 2021.
It took six years for annual sales of Bibigo dumplings to surpass 100 billion won since the product was launched in 2010. However, K-pop mania around the world has increased the popularity of Korean food, helping the company's dumpling sales to exceed 1 trillion won in four years in 2020.
