Sulbing opens 1st US store in California in March next year

South Korean dessert café Sulbing said on Friday that it signed a new master franchise contract to declare its entry into the US market and announced that it would open the first American Sulbing store in San Jose, California, in March next year.

San Jose is famous for a high-tech research complex along the San Francisco Bay and is located within Silicon Valley. The location was selected in consideration of market potential, such as the fact that it is an area that leads global trends, has strong purchasing power due to leading tech companies in the vicinities, the fact that many Asians live in it, and the fact that they are relatively familiar with Korean culture.

Sulbing has selected Joo Seung-gi, the current CEO of Sulbing California, as a partner to enter the US market. Mr. Joo is a distribution professional who has run The One and Only, an export distribution company, in charge of importing overseas food items for many years.

At the contract-signing ceremony, he expressed his ambitions, saying, "We will use the one-of-a-kind differentiation of Sulbing as our competitiveness by utilizing our local understanding of the US market and the human network."

The United States is a symbolic market where various cultures coexist in a large territory and various desserts are on offer. Sulbing plans to target the taste buds of Americans with a menu of Korean-style dessert bingsu (shaved ice dessert), which is unfamiliar to Americans.

Write to Kyeong-je Han at hankyung@hankyung.com