Picture the breakfast table. A cup of coffee mix, the yellow packet torn open and shaken into hot water. At lunch, a can of tuna, lid peeled back, stirred into a bowl of rice. It is all so familiar that we have hardly ever wondered who actually makes these things. We just pick them up off the supermarket shelf. And yet behind these two ordinary objects stand two walls, one each. As promised in the preface, today I want to call them out by name. On the second floor of the building — at our table.
A Country Called Maxim
Go to a Korean supermarket to buy coffee mix and there is, in truth, not much to choose from. There is Maxim, Kanu beside it, and Maxwell House a little way off. They look like the products of rival companies, but all three belong to one. Dongsuh Foods. In the coffee mix market, this company's share comes to about 88%. Which means that of every ten packets, nine are, in effect, Dongsuh Foods. Calling this competition feels a little embarrassing.
The reason this wall stands is simple. People do not buy coffee mix; they buy Maxim. The name has become the thing itself. Once a brand becomes another name for the market as such, making a good product is no longer enough for a competitor. You would have to pry that yellow packet — the one people's hands already remember — loose from habit. And that is not a question of taste but a question of years.
Dongsuh Foods is not a listed company, so its annual results come out a little late. Revenue for 2025 was 1.8105 trillion won, up 1.1% from the year before, and operating profit was 179.3 billion won. Numbers that do not grow much, but hardly ever shrink either. And more than 80% of that revenue still comes from coffee — from mix coffee above all.
Yet even this seemingly perfect kingdom carries a quiet crack. The mix coffee market itself is growing old. People drink more and more brewed coffee, cheap americanos, capsule coffee. The hands tearing open yellow packets grow slightly fewer each year. Even with 88% in your grip, if the bowl called the market is itself shrinking, there is not much to be done. So between 2024 and 2025, Dongsuh Foods raised its coffee prices twice. Unable to sell more units, it raised the price attached to each one. It is a scene we have seen somewhere before. Kakao did it, and so did the telecom companies. The path chosen by the ruler of a fully grown market looks, strangely, much the same from one industry to the next.
From the Sea to the Table
Canned tuna is a somewhat different kind of story. In the domestic canned tuna market, Dongwon's share is about 80%. It has been the unshakable number one for more than forty years. But this wall was not built on brand or habit alone. It was built from much further down — from the sea.
Dongwon began as a company that caught tuna. It sends deep-sea vessels out to catch tuna in the Pacific, processes it in its own plants, and carries it to the table through its own distribution network. From the catching to the selling, one company holds the whole of it. This structure is called vertical integration. There is little room for a competitor to wedge itself in. To enter this market, someone else would have to build the ships, the plants, the distribution network, and the eighty years of accumulated name, all over again from the beginning. As with the semiconductor wall, this too is a wall built less with money than with time.
Dongwon's ambitions did not stop at home. In 2008, it spent about 445 billion won ($363 million) to acquire StarKist, the number one canned tuna brand in the United States. So today Dongwon is number one in canned tuna not only on the Korean table but on the American one as well. Its share in the US also exceeds 40%. The wall that began in the sea has crossed the Pacific.
| Item | Dongsuh Foods (coffee) | Dongwon Industries (tuna & group) |
|---|
| Dominant domestic market | Coffee mix, approx. 88% | Canned tuna, approx. 79.8% |
| 2025 results | Revenue 1.8105 trillion won (+1.1%) · operating profit 179.3 billion won | Consolidated revenue 9.5836 trillion won (+7.2%) · operating profit 515.6 billion won (+2.9%) |
| Nature of the wall | Brand and habit | Vertical integration from the sea to the table |
In 2025, the Dongwon Industries group's consolidated revenue was 9.5836 trillion won, and its operating profit was 515.6 billion won. In July of that year, Dongwon went so far as to delist Dongwon F&B, which had been on the exchange for more than forty years, folding it in as a wholly owned subsidiary of Dongwon Industries and gathering its scattered food businesses into one. Dongwon F&B alone, thus brought inside, posted 2025 revenue of 4.8777 trillion won (+8.8%) and operating profit of 193.8 billion won. Within these large numbers, of course, canned tuna is only one part. Dongwon became more than a tuna company a long time ago. It has reached into dairy and processed meats, into logistics and packaging materials, even into battery materials. And here again the familiar picture appears. The main house called canned tuna no longer grows, so the company keeps building new rooms beside it.
Two Walls on the Table
Coffee mix and canned tuna. Entirely different things, and yet on the same floor called the table, the two companies raised walls in their own ways.
Dongsuh Foods' wall is built of name and habit. A soft, old wall, inside which the name Maxim has come almost to stand in for the words coffee mix. Dongwon's wall is built of vertical integration running from the sea to the table. A hard, deep wall that anyone hoping to imitate would have to build from the very beginning. Different in character, the two walls are equally high. And they carry the same worry. The markets inside the walls — mix coffee and canned tuna — are no longer growing much.
So when I look at these two monopolies on the table, I read the sentence that comes after the market share first. What new room is this company building beside its aging main house. Dongsuh Foods is looking for the answer in premium coffee and new categories; Dongwon, in all manner of businesses beyond tuna. The numbers 88% and 80% are certainly reassuring. Only this much is worth noting quietly at the edge of the plate: the bowl those numbers guard is, little by little, getting smaller.
The People Who Stay Twenty Years
The companies that keep the table also keep their people, and for a long time. Dongsuh Foods especially.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| Dongsuh Foods | approx. 1,100* | around 100 million won* | about 20 years* | approx. 1.64 billion won | approx. 160 million won |
| Dongwon F&B | 3,260 | 49.44 million won | 9.2 years | approx. 670 million won (separate) | approx. 31 million won |
Basis: FY2025 (2025-12-31) annual and audit reports; revenue and operating profit per employee on a separate (non-consolidated) basis. *Dongsuh Foods is unlisted and discloses none of these. Headcount is based on national-pension data; pay is a press calculation dividing the total employee payroll in the audit report (119.0 billion won in 2021) by headcount; tenure is 20.1 years as of 2021 (press reports). Not FY2025 disclosure figures.
Dongsuh Foods, being unlisted, discloses neither pay nor tenure. But there are numbers that have slipped out through the seams of the ledgers. The last confirmed average tenure was 20.1 years — longer, in the same year, than the tobacco company of the first chapter. Twice the average of Korea’s big food companies. Divide the total payroll in the audit report by the headcount and you land close to 100 million won a person. It is a company that rarely hires mid-career, so the people who walked in twenty years ago are still inside the wall. Some eleven hundred people sell 1.8 trillion won's worth, which comes to 1.6 billion won of sales per person. If the name Maxim is a wall built of years, the people guarding that wall are fewer than you would expect, and they stay longer than you would expect. The 3,260 people of Dongwon F&B, meanwhile, each sell 670 million won's worth and keep 31 million. The long chain that runs from the sea to the table is a wall that needs far more human hands.
The next story is also the table. The bag of bread picked up in the morning and the green bottle of the evening. SPC Samlip in mass-produced bread and HiteJinro in soju — two walls on the same table that passed through 2025 in exactly opposite directions.
This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and industry sources; some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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