CJ Freshway Strengthens Collaboration with Food Tech Startups... Leading Food Business Innovation

On the 12th, at the CJ Freshway headquarters located in Sangam-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, Kim Jong-sun, Head of Strategic Planning (center), Shin Sikshin CEO Ahn Byung-ik (left), and Raesik CEO Kim Han-sung (right) took a commemorative photo after signing a business agreement.

[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] CJ Group’s food ingredient distribution and group catering specialist CJ Freshway is strengthening its role as a ‘food business partner’ by continuously partnering with food tech startups.

On the 13th, CJ Freshway announced that it had signed business agreements with the mobile meal voucher and restaurant platform ‘Siksin’ and the virtual kitchen service platform ‘Cooksub,’ respectively. Through this agreement, they have decided to join forces to develop meal and business solutions based on food tech. Meal and business solutions are one of CJ Freshway’s core competencies, supporting customized products such as food ingredient packages and services related to overall management for the success of customer businesses.

‘Siksin’ operates ‘Siksin eSikgeon,’ the largest mobile meal voucher service for office workers in Korea with 150,000 users, and ‘Siksin,’ a big data-based restaurant information service with 4 million monthly visitors. ‘Cooksub,’ a cook-fulfillment service, is a virtual kitchen service platform by the food tech startup ‘Raesik.’ A virtual kitchen is a service that provides kitchens, staff, and delivery services to food service operators with recipes, enabling them to easily expand their branches.

Last year, both companies participated in the 4th round of CJ Group’s open innovation program for startups, ‘Oventus,’ where they carried out CJ Freshway’s food tech projects and won the grand prize at the final demo day.

This business agreement was established to maximize synergy by combining the infrastructure owned by CJ Freshway, a leading company in the food ingredient distribution industry, with the technological capabilities of food tech startups.

CJ Freshway plans to provide a mobile meal voucher system to improve meal cost management convenience for catering operators together with ‘Siksin.’ By using mobile meal vouchers, catering operators can easily perform automatic settlement and menu management through an app instead of manual ledgers or paper meal vouchers, enabling efficient store operation. They will also develop an external dining ‘trend catching’ service using big data on popular restaurants. Food service operators can check the latest trends by commercial district and industry through the service and strengthen store competitiveness by developing new menus based on this information.

With ‘Raesik,’ which operates ‘Cooksub,’ CJ Freshway will support business expansion for food service operators. Food service operators can flexibly expand their business without separate store rental or hiring staff by simply providing recipes to ‘Cooksub’s’ virtual kitchen, which is fully equipped with kitchen facilities and personnel. CJ Freshway plans to collaborate with ‘Cooksub’ to provide a stepping stone for food service clients to enter the franchise business.

Kim Jongseon, Head of Strategic Planning at CJ Freshway, said, “To respond to technological advancements and rapidly changing consumer patterns, the food ingredient distribution industry must break away from traditional business models and pursue continuous innovation. CJ Freshway will continuously cooperate with startups with high growth potential to lead the paradigm shift in the food business together.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.