Why Koreans Are Obsessed With Bread: Inside a National Bakery Festival in Seoul

Last Saturday morning, my 24-month-old daughter shoved a half-eaten sogeum-ppang (소금빵, salt bread) into my face and yelled "abba, more!" We were standing in the middle of Garak Mall's rooftop garden in Songpa-gu, Seoul, surrounded by about forty other families doing exactly the same thing. My wife — seven months pregnant with our second — was already in line at a second bakery booth, hand on her lower back, eyes locked on a tray of cream cheese garlic bread coming out of a portable oven. I had driven us up from Yongin that morning, an hour through traffic, specifically so we could spend a Saturday eating bread from twenty-two different bakeries in one place. And the wild part? This was just a regular weekend in Korea.

The event is called Jeonguk Bbangji Jarang (전국빵지자랑) — literally "National Bread Showcase" — and it ran May 8th to 10th this year, the third one Seoul has hosted. Free entry. Twenty-two bakeries hand-picked from across the country: fifteen from Seoul, three from Gyeonggi, three from Gangwon, one from Daejeon. Over one hundred different breads in a single rooftop garden. And honestly, by the time we left at 3 p.m. with three shopping bags and a sticky daughter, I was thinking the same thing I always think when I take foreign friends through a Korean bakery: is there another country on Earth this obsessed with bread?

The Festival Itself

Garak Mall (가락몰) is a massive wholesale food complex in southeast Seoul — it's where most of the country's fresh produce passes through before reaching apartment-block supermarkets like the one near my place in Yongin. The third floor has a rooftop "Sky Park" (하늘공원) that the city converts into festival space a few times a year. When we arrived around 11 a.m., the elevator line stretched back into the underground parking lot. My wife and I exchanged the look every Korean parent of a toddler knows: this is going to be a lot.

Inside, the smell hit before anything else. Butter, yeast, sugar, garlic, coffee, all baking in open-air booths under a clear May sky. Each bakery had a tent: Bakery Garu (베이커리가루) from Sokcho with their famous cream cheese bagels, Pang Pamiyu (팡파미유) from Gangneung — the one that supposedly invented Korean-style cream cheese garlic bread that went viral in Malaysia three years ago — and Farmer's Garden (파머스가든) from Chuncheon with their potato breads made from local Gangwon-do potatoes. Each booth had a queue. The shortest one I saw was eight people deep.

A salt bread cost ₩3,500 (about $2.50 USD). A loaded cream cheese garlic bread was ₩5,000. A specialty bagel with green-onion cream cheese ran ₩4,500. I watched a family of four spend about ₩45,000 — roughly $32 — in maybe twelve minutes, then sit down on the grass and eat half of it on the spot.

Jeonguk Bbangji Jarang (전국빵지자랑), the National Bread Festival held annually at Garak Mall's Sky Park in Songpa-gu, Seoul.

"Bbangji Sunrye" — The Bread Pilgrimage

To understand why a free bread festival pulls families from across the country, you have to know about bbangji sunrye (빵지순례), which translates roughly to "bread pilgrimage." It's a portmanteau — bbang means bread, seongji sunrye is a religious pilgrimage. Young Koreans, especially the so-called MZ generation (millennials and Gen Z), travel hours by KTX bullet train just to queue at a specific bakery in Gangneung, Daejeon, or Suwon for one specific bread.

This isn't a niche subculture. Search the hashtag #빵지순례 on Instagram and you'll find over a million posts. Travel apps now publish bbangji sunrye routes the same way they used to publish temple-stay routes. The city of Cheonan runs an official "ppangji" stamp tour every year — eat at seventy-seven different bakeries, collect stamps on a mobile app, win prizes. Every Korean city of any size now has its "must-visit" bakery, the way every Italian town has its trattoria.

What surprised me — coming back to Korea after growing up in England, where a "bread pilgrimage" would mean visiting one good sourdough place in Borough Market — is how seriously people take regional bread identity here. Sokcho is salt bread country. Gangneung is for coffee bean bread and cream cheese garlic bread. Gyeongju has the famous "ten-won bread" (십원빵), shaped like the Korean ten-won coin and filled with mozzarella. Daejeon has Sungsimdang (성심당), arguably the most famous bakery in the country, where lines start before sunrise. People plan weekend trips around these places the way other countries plan trips around museums.

But Wait — Isn't Korea a Rice Country?

This is the question every foreign visitor asks me, and the answer is: not anymore, not really. Per-capita rice consumption in Korea has fallen from 106.5 kg per person in 1995 to just 56 kg in 2023, according to Statistics Korea. That's roughly half a bowl of rice per person per day. In the same period, bakery industry revenue has grown into a multi-trillion-won market, and "bread" has quietly become a staple food rather than a snack.

Part of this is convenience. I get up at 6:20 a.m. on weekdays for my commute to Siheung, and I cannot — physically, mentally — prepare a traditional Korean breakfast of rice, soup, and three side dishes. So I grab a milk-cream bun from the GS25 convenience store downstairs, or I duck into the Paris Baguette (파리바게뜨) at Yongin Station for a ham-and-egg roll. Paris Baguette alone has over 3,400 stores in Korea — more than McDonald's, Starbucks, and Burger King combined.

But convenience doesn't fully explain it. Plenty of countries have bakery chains. What's different here is that Korea didn't just adopt bread — Korea localized it, the same way it did with fried chicken, with coffee, with Italian pasta. (If you've read my earlier post on why Koreans drink sweet coffee right after spicy meals, you'll recognize the pattern.)

The Korean Twist

European bread is, broadly speaking, savory. A French baguette is salt, flour, water, yeast. A German rye is dense and tangy. Korean bread is — and I say this as someone who grew up eating Hovis loaves in Nottingham — almost aggressively sweet. Even a "plain" baguette at most Korean bakeries arrives stuffed with condensed milk cream or raspberry custard. A "garlic bread" here means a round bun split open, soaked in butter, sugar, and milk, then injected with cream cheese, then baked again. It's closer to a dessert than a side dish.

The 2020s have been particularly wild. Salt bread (sogeum-ppang) was originally a Japanese invention called shio pan, which Korean bakeries adopted around 2022 and then transformed completely — adding red bean fillings, Earl Grey custard, mentaiko (spicy cod roe), even green onion. Bagels were almost unheard of in Korea five years ago; today, London Bagel Museum in Anguk-dong has lines that start at 7 a.m. and bagels topped with everything from rye-and-walnut cream cheese to jjokpa (Korean spring onion) cream cheese. A basic bagel costs ₩3,800, but the loaded versions can hit ₩8,500. That's about $6 for one bagel. People pay it. Happily.

And every six months, there's a new craze. When I came back from England in 2019, the obsession was Dalgona coffee. By 2022 it was salt bread. By 2024, it was Dubai chocolate pistachio croissants. Right now, my Instagram feed is full of tangerine cream cheese sourdough from a bakery in Jeju that I will probably end up driving my family to visit before our second baby arrives in September.

Sharing a fresh cream cheese garlic bread (마늘크림치즈빵) with my daughter — one of Korea's most popular bakery items, originally from Gangneung.

So Is Korea Really Bread-Obsessed?

Here's what I've come to think, watching my daughter inhale half a salt bread on the grass at Garak Mall while my pregnant wife debated which final two breads to take home: Korea isn't bread-obsessed in the way France is bread-obsessed. France has a thousand-year relationship with bread; it's woven into the national identity. Korea's relationship with bread is barely fifty years old, and that's exactly why it feels so intense. There's no orthodoxy. There's no "this is how bread should taste." Korean bakers can put gochujang in a sourdough, or cover a croissant in pistachio paste, or invent a bun shaped like a coin, and nobody clutches pearls about it. Bread here is a playground, not a tradition.

The result is that an entire country of fifty-one million people is running, simultaneously, the world's most chaotic bread laboratory. New trends appear monthly. Old trends die in weeks. Bakeries open and shutter in the time it takes a French boulangerie to perfect a single baguette recipe. And in the middle of it all, on a Saturday in May, twenty-two of them gather on a rooftop in Songpa, and a few thousand families like mine drive an hour to stand in line and find out what's next.

If you ever come to Korea, skip one of the obvious tourist meals — the bibimbap dinner, the Korean BBQ night — and instead spend a Saturday on a bbangji sunrye. Take a train to Daejeon and queue at Sungsimdang at 9 a.m. Take another train to Gangneung for cream cheese garlic bread. Eat them on a bench outside the station. You'll learn more about modern Korea in that one afternoon than in any palace tour. And if you happen to be in Seoul next May when the Jeonguk Bbangji Jarang festival runs again — go. Bring a stroller. Bring elastic-waist pants. We'll probably see you there.

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📦 The Haru Box sends one short story a week about real Korean daily life — written from Yongin by a Korean-British dad raising two kids in the country he grew up half-in. Subscribe here for the next one.

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