What the business is
Korea's leading bakery group, operating Shake Shack Korea, Baskin-Robbins, Dunkin' Donuts and its own City Deli snack brand alongside its Paris Croissant bakery business.
The bet
That SPC could keep importing hit US food brands into Korea — Shake Shack in 2016, Eggslut in 2020 — and reproduce their home-market hype lines.
How it started
SPC won Shake Shack's Korea rights in 2016 after then-vice president Hur Hee-soo spent five years travelling back and forth to New York to beat 30 competing bidders. The group later took Shake Shack to Singapore — targeting more than 10 outlets by 2024 — brought Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin' Donuts to Korea, and in June 2019 signed a deal, credited to Hur, to exclusively supply Kraft Heinz products in the local market.
What happened
Eggslut — the Los Angeles egg-sandwich brand founded by chef Alvin Cailan in 2011, known for brioche buns, coddled eggs and sriracha mayo, already in four countries including the UK and Japan — opened its first Korean branch in the affluent Gangnam district's COEX mall in July 2020, drawing 300+ on day one. SPC weighed further Eggslut openings in downtown Seoul and larger regional cities. In November 2019 the group also launched City Deli, its own 200-item walk-in snack brand in Gwanghwamun, as a test bed for diversification.
What has to be true
Each brand's opening queue validated the model and raised SPC's standing with the next US brand's owners.
The strategy imported proven hype rather than building it, at the cost of marathon rights negotiations.
City Deli showed the same group hedging imports with an owned brand built on its bakery infrastructure.
What can be applied
Licensing hype brands is a bidding business: five years of courting and beating 30 rivals is the real product, and every launch's opening queue becomes leverage for the next contract.
Aftermath
As of 12 July 2020, Eggslut Korea was days old with expansion under consideration, and Hur was tipped to return to management within two years.
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