Jeongyukkak's ₩90B grocery bet: a fresh-meat star ends in liquidation

Jeongyukkak (정육각) was a South Korean fresh-food e-commerce platform selling meat, eggs and meal kits online: orders triggered production, and its own logistics delivered meat slaughtered within days, same-day or pre-dawn.

Jeongyukkak bet radical freshness (dated slaughter, own delivery) could win online meat — then staked everything on a ₩90B grocery chain.

About ₩70B raised from venture investors including Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Stonebridge Ventures, Atinum Investment and Capstone Partners (KAIST Alumni/viva100). To fund the ₩90B Chorok Maeul acquisition it planned a ₩150B Series D; the deteriorating market left the round far short, and in October 2022 it bridged with a ₩32B three-month Shinhan Capital loan, later pledging its Gimpo smart-factory headquarters as collateral (MoneyToday, 2023-02-06).

Kim Jaeyeon, a KAIST applied-mathematics graduate, founded Jeongyukkak in 2016 after seeing how many days and middlemen stood between slaughter and dinner. The startup compressed that chain, stamped dates on its meat and eggs, and sold direct with its own logistics and near-zero waste.

By 2020 revenue reached ₩16.2B and about ₩70B had come from leading Korean VCs. In 2022 Jeongyukkak agreed to buy Chorok Maeul from Daesang Group for about ₩90B — a chain of nearly 400 organic-grocery stores with more than 20 years of history but losses since 2018 — beating Market Kurly and Barogo, with E-Mart Every Day also weighing a bid. To pay, investors had promised a ₩150B Series D, but when the cash was needed the round had shrunk; Jeongyukkak took a ₩32B short-term loan from Shinhan Capital in October 2022 and later pledged its Gimpo headquarters as collateral when repayment slipped.

The acquisition never paid for itself: cumulative operating losses ran to ₩82.8B from 2021 through 2023 (Seoul Economic Daily). On July 4, 2025 Jeongyukkak and Chorok Maeul filed for court rehabilitation; the court granted commencement the same day while Jeongyukkak paused its own operations and Chorok Maeul kept trading. On August 21, 2026 Seoul Bankruptcy Court Division 18 terminated the procedure, ruling liquidation value exceeded going-concern value, and Jeongyukkak headed for liquidation (theBell).

The ₩90B price assumed a ₩150B follow-on round; when the funding market froze, the round closed far short and a ₩32B bridge loan against the company's headquarters filled the gap (MoneyToday).

Chorok Maeul had lost money since 2018 — burdened by middle-distribution costs and no online channel — so it needed the very capital the failed round was supposed to supply (KAIST Alumni/viva100).

Ultra-fresh own-logistics delivery was structurally expensive — ₩8B loss in 2020 and ₩24.9B in 2021 before the deal, ₩82.8B cumulative in 2021–2023 (MoneyToday, Seoul Economic Daily).

Once in court, the group's liquidation value outweighed its going-concern value, so the judge chose winding down over a revival plan (theBell).

A growth acquisition priced on an equity round is a debt bet the day funding freezes: the ₩150B that was promised never arrived, and the bridge loan plus losses decided the end.

After the July 2025 rehabilitation filing, Chorok Maeul's nearly 400 stores, online mall and logistics kept operating while Jeongyukkak's own fresh-meat service was paused. When Seoul Bankruptcy Court Division 18 terminated the rehabilitation on August 21, 2026, theBell reported that creditors were pursuing an acquisition of Chorok Maeul while Jeongyukkak itself faced liquidation — roughly a year after the filing, and about two years after the ₩90B acquisition that was supposed to scale the company.