Super-spicy noodles make former stay-at-home mom a billionaire

It all started from a YouTube video in which a British man attempted to eat Buldak — fire chicken — noodles ten years ago.

That quickly turned viral, with a flood of people posting short videos of themselves daring the notoriously spicy ramen. Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B recounted how she drove for 30 minutes just to buy it. Some noodles were briefly recalled in Denmark earlier this year for being too spicy.

Behind it all is 60-year-old South Korean heiress Kim Jung-soo, who's leading the food giant Samyang Roundsquare. Now the instant ramen's popularity abroad has driven a 215% surge in the group's flagship Samyang Foods Co. this year, boosting the fortune of Kim, her husband and children, to nearly $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

It's a remarkable turn of events for Kim, who was a stay-at-home mom when her father-in-law asked her to join Samyang Foods, a then struggling family business in 1998. Now she's group chief executive officer. In a country where a handful of patriarch-led families dominate business, Kim stands out.

"Kim didn't have any previous management experience," said Park Ju-gun, head of corporate research firm Leaders Index in Seoul. "It's very exceptional that her father-in-law let her join managing the company instead of considering other options among male family members."

In 2011, Kim came up with the idea of Buldak noodles after she saw how much people enjoyed eating spicy chicken stir-fry at a South Korean restaurant despite clearly sweating and struggling. At first the prototypes, made after a year of research using 1,200 chickens and 2 tons of sauce, faced doubts because they were too spicy, Kim said in an interview with a local newspaper in February.

Lately, demand is so high that the company hasn't been able to keep up and fill shelves at Walmart Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. stores across the US, wrote Kim Tae-hyun, analyst at Seoul-based IBK Securities, in a report earlier this month. Samyang Foods revenues jumped 44.2% to 1.2 trillion won ($839 million) in the first nine months, of which 75% came from exports of noodles, according to filings.

The US, where Buldak noodles were introduced two years ago, has risen to become the company's largest overseas market, accounting for some 20% of total sales, according to a written response from a spokesperson for Samyang Roundsquare. That's equates to growth of 120% compared with the previous year.

Turnaround Years

Samyang's performance today is quite a turnaround from facing a bankruptcy risk during the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s. The founding family's shares were handed over to creditors and were only regained in 2005.

Kim and her husband were found guilty in 2020 for embezzling company funds worth some 5 billion won and using it for personal expenses such as house repair and credit card bills. Kim got a suspended sentence while her husband, Samyang's chairman at the time, was sentenced to a three-year jail term. Kim was pardoned last year.

Kim declined to comment for this story.

After expanding in the US and China, Samyang is expected to continue growing overseas with a new company set up in the Netherlands for European sales, according to a November report by DS Investment and Securities.

"When Buldak became globally popular, it was deemed a temporary interest at first," said Kevin Han, research analyst at Euromonitor International. "If its products can offer practical values to consumers while being a fun and new experience, I expect the brand to build a long-lasting growth in the global market."