"Capturing Home Party Demand"... Food and Beverage Industry Busy with Christmas and Year-End Specials

Home Party Popularity Rises Amid COVID-19 and Severe Cold
Food and Beverage Industry Begins Full-Scale Demand Capture
Cake and Meal Kits Benefit from Home Party Trend

Citizens visiting Namdaemun Market in Seoul are looking at Christmas decoration items. Photo by Heo Younghan younghan@

[Asia Economy Reporter Song Seung-yoon] As the year-end peak season including Christmas approaches, the food and beverage industry is bustling with activity. Especially this year, home parties, which became a trend after COVID-19, are rising again, leading to a flood of new products and promotions aimed at capturing the home party crowd.

According to the industry on the 23rd, new products and promotions targeting Christmas and year-end home parties are continuously being launched in the food and beverage sector. With the overlapping effects of COVID-19 and rising prices, home parties have settled as a new culture among the MZ (Millennial + Generation Z) generation, and demand for home parties is expected to continue this year as well. Christmas is considered the last major sales period of the year-end for the food and beverage industry. The spread of home-cooked meal culture, boosted by the popularity of ready-to-eat meals after COVID-19, has also contributed. The earlier-than-usual cold weather this year played a part as well.

Home party demand is divided into value-for-money and premium markets. This phenomenon is especially prominent in Christmas’s representative food, cake. Shinsegae Food introduced value-for-money cakes priced between 9,000 and 10,000 won, including the ‘Bbangbbangduck Mini Cake’ priced at 9,980 won, through E Bakery and Boulangerie stores inside Emart. The Bbangbbangduck Mini Cake sold more than 15,000 units within three weeks of its launch, accounting for nearly 50% of total Christmas cake sales. From the 1st to the 20th of this month, Christmas cake sales increased by 30% compared to the same period last year, surpassing 30,000 units in cumulative sales. Conversely, as more people seek to spend the year-end in a special way, premium cakes are also popular. Many premium cakes from major hotels, priced between 80,000 and 200,000 won, have already been fully booked.

Meal kits are also benefiting from the home party trend. In the last month, when year-end gatherings began in earnest, the sales proportion of home party meal kits from meal kit specialist MyChef rose about 50% compared to the previous month. They expect the growth trend to be even more pronounced this month, which includes Christmas and the year-end season. To target this, MyChef recently launched new home party menus such as ‘Solo Beef Chuck Flap Tail Steak’ and ‘Hearty Italian Bolognese Lasagna’ with an authentic Italian home-cooked concept. They are also running a hangover menu promotion offering discounts on soup meal kits that can be easily enjoyed after year-end drinking parties. Fresh Easy also released three year-end home party meal kits for consumers preparing for home parties: ‘Bacon Basil Cream Risotto,’ ‘Shrimp Toowoomba Pasta,’ and ‘French Onion Soup.’

With Christmas, a day children look forward to all year, the food and beverage industry is steadily launching products targeting this occasion. Haitai Confectionery introduced three Christmas edition cakes through its premium gelato brand ‘Pallazzo.’ Orion launched an online limited advent calendar, which can be opened one door each day until the 25th, to count down to Christmas. CJ Freshway is conducting cooking classes using a cake-making kit released this month by its kids’ food brand Ainuri to celebrate the year-end. This is a food culture education content featuring the popular children’s characters ‘Carrie and Friends,’ who are loved by many children.

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