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Cover Story

succeeding with a new dining-out business among South and services for opening a coffee shop, including location
Koreans suffering from job loss and financial difficulty selection, interior concept, menu recipe and equipment
due to IMF bailout in 1997. The increase in brand aware- selection. Furthermore, there have been a lot of exchange
ness created a trend that made consumers meet Starbucks activities with the foreign coffee markets. As a result,
coffee more naturally and consume it with trust. On the more and more people have recognized the world level
other hand, the opening of Starbucks shops forced a lot of coffee competition. Also, the occupation of barista has
home grown authentic espresso market, which had been been accepted as an official job. In addition, the rapid
successfully established in South Korea, to lose its identity growth of Internet made people express their interest of
due to the brand power of Starbucks. A lot of consumers coffee in Internet portal. The popularity of “iloveespresso.
preferred the strategy of Starbucks. Thus, a lot of cafes com” has satisfied the desires of many coffee enthusiasts.
emphasizing espresso have changed their business direc- The contents form this website became the foundation of
tion. As a result, South Korea’s espresso has been replaced South Korea’s first monthly “Coffee” magazine.
by such sweet and colorful menus as ‘Cafe Mocha’ and As such, the coffee industry has become fragmented into
‘Caramel Macchiato’. several specific sub-domains including business foun-
dation, training, barista, contest and magazine. Thus,
2000 to 2004 some of the unique organizations and associations were
Those large-sized franchise companies such as Starbucks established at this time. University professors opened
and Hollys have continued to dominate the market. coffee related course in their respective university and at-
Thanks to these franchise companies, consumers have tracted students. The Korea Coffee Association (formerly
encountered coffee anywhere and anytime in a more known as the Korea Coffee Education Society), which was
convenient way. However, the rapid growth of these founded mainly by the aforementioned university profes-
large franchise companies forced small individual coffee sors, began the barista authentication business (currently
shops to have hard time for their business. They did not barista license) for the first time in South Korea. In addi-
have any specific menu with which they could compete tion, those coffee related companied that had been a part
effectively with the large-sized companies. They could not of the nation’s coffee industry even before 1990 founded
even afford to plan for establishing a systematic system, another Korea Coffee Aliance to provide and exchange
which those large-size franchise companies had. Thus, a information for coffee-related professional companies.
lot of individual coffee shops have converted into a fran- That is, many organizations with a similar purpose have
chisee business. Moreover, the other industrial fields have been established at this time.
leveraged coffee in their business diversification efforts.
Some of the existing machine manufacturers and coffee 2005 to 2014
suppliers became aware of the coffee market trend; thus, With the influence of Starbucks that gave emphasis to
they chose coffee related training business in order to the professionalism of coffee with professional barista
increase their sales. That is to say, they started a business as a motif, barista, professional espresso machine and
of creating new customer group based on their products coffee quality have gained more importance. However,
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