Korean snacks · Data

The 10 snacks Koreans actually buy most

By Sunny Park · Updated August 2, 2026 · Based on 2025 first-half retail sales

Heads up: some links below are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through them — at no extra cost to you. The ranking itself is government-collected sales data and isn't influenced by anything.

Why this list is different

I've read a lot of "top Korean snacks" posts written for English readers. Most of them are somebody's personal ranking dressed up as a fact, and you can usually tell because the order looks like a list of whatever went viral on TikTok that year.

This is the other thing. Korea's Food Industry Statistics Information (FIS) tracks retail sales by product, and the numbers below are the first half of 2025 — every category counted together, so chips compete with chocolate and biscuits in the same table. There's no taste-testing involved. It's just what came through the tills.

I'll add my own notes underneath, because a sales chart tells you what Koreans buy, not what any of it tastes like. That part I can help with — I grew up on most of this shelf.

The top 10

Source: Food Industry Statistics Information (FIS), retail sales, January–June 2025. Roughly ₩1bn ≈ US$700,000 at 2025 rates.

Three things this list tells you

What each one actually tastes like

1. Shrimp Crackers — Saewookkang

Light, airy, faintly sweet, and much more shrimp-forward than the name suggests to a Western ear — this is not a subtle seafood note, it's the whole point of the snack. The texture is closer to a puffed cracker than a chip.

It has been number one for two years running and it launched in 1971. Fifty-plus years at the top of a market this competitive is the real story here. I ranked six of its flavours here, including the ones you can't get outside Korea.

2. Poca Chip

Korea's answer to a classic thin-cut potato chip, and the fastest grower in the entire top ten — up 8.1% year on year. If you handed one to an American without the bag, they'd recognise it immediately. The difference is in the seasoning range, which runs to things like soy-garlic and Korean pepper.

3. Choco Pie

Two soft cake rounds, marshmallow in the middle, chocolate over the whole thing. It's the snack Korea exports best — you'll find it made locally in China, Vietnam and Russia — and at home it's a fixture of every office break room and every hiking backpack.

4. Pepero

Chocolate-dipped biscuit sticks, and the only snack on this list with its own national holiday — November 11, because the date looks like four sticks. That holiday distorts the numbers: a large share of Pepero's annual sales land in the second half of the year, which means its first-half placing at #4 understates it.

I ate all seven flavours and ranked them here. Short version: Nude and Almond.

5. Pringles

Not Korean, but firmly part of the Korean shelf — and Korea gets flavours that never reach the US. That's a whole article of its own, and it's coming.

6. Kokal Kon

Little corn cones — the closest American reference point is Bugles. Korean children famously eat them off their fingertips, one cone per finger, which is a memory almost every Korean adult shares. The savoury original is the one that sells; the sweet corn version is the one people argue about.

7. Home Run Ball

Hollow, crisp shells filled with chocolate cream — like a tiny cream puff that shattered and got better for it. It's the only biscuit-category product to crack the overall top ten, which makes its placing more impressive than the raw number suggests. I put it head to head with Kancho here.

8. Ferrero Rocher

The gift chocolate. In Korea this sells less as a snack and more as a thing you hand to someone, which is why it holds a top-ten slot without anyone describing it as a favourite.

9. Ghana Chocolate

A plain milk chocolate bar that has been on Korean shelves for fifty years. It's the baseline everyone measures other chocolate against, not because it's remarkable but because it was always there.

10. Squid Peanut

Peanuts coated in a squid-flavoured shell. It sounds alarming in English and it is genuinely savoury-fishy, but it's a beer snack more than a candy — the Korean equivalent of bar nuts. This is the one on the list most likely to divide a Western palate.

What's missing — and why that matters

Here's the part that surprises people who follow Korean snacks from abroad: some of the most famous "Korean snacks" internationally are not on this list at all.

The clearest case is Turtle Chips (Kkobuk Chip). It's stocked at Costco in the US, it's in Google and Netflix office snack bars, and it's one of the first things recommended to anyone starting on Korean snacks. In Korea, it isn't in the top ten. Its Korean sales peaked in 2021 and have fallen by more than half since.

Honey Butter Chip is another. It caused a genuine national shortage in 2014 — people were reselling bags at a markup — and today it sits well outside this ranking. I wrote about why here, and the short version is that a craze and a habit are different things.

The practical takeaway: if you want to eat what Koreans eat, the list above is your shopping list. If you want the snacks Koreans get excited about, that's a different list — and it changes every year. Both are legitimate ways to shop. They're just not the same thing.

Where to buy these in the US

Most of this list travels. Shrimp Crackers, Choco Pie, Pepero and Home Run Ball are all easy to find on Amazon or at H Mart. Kokal Kon and Squid Peanut are more of a Korean-grocery trip than a mainstream buy.

A note on that link: I've filtered it to Prime-eligible sellers. Since the US ended duty-free treatment for low-value parcels, listings shipping directly from Korea can arrive slowly and can leave you with a customs bill at the door. Prime stock is already sitting in a US warehouse.