Utah Founders Put 100,000 Cups of Tteokbokki Into Target. The Trial Still Decides If They Stay.

About 100,000 cups of Korean street food are sitting in Target stores right now. Korean Bros, a Utah packaged-food company founded by Korean American partners, says it reached roughly 300 Target locations in nine months and spent more than $200,000 on the push, including a rose tteokbokki flavor made only for the chain after Target told them to move fast.

Co-founder James Seo does not treat that as a permanent win. Target, he has said, wants to see whether shoppers actually buy the cups before it expands the rollout. Shelf placement opens the door. Sell-through decides whether the cups stay.

Tteokbokki is one of Korea’s everyday street snacks: thick, chewy rice cakes simmered in a sticky sauce. Korean Bros sells original, cheese, and spicy cheese versions, and markets the cheese cup as Korean mac and cheese. The packaging is bright yellow, pink, and cyan on purpose. It looks nothing like the muted import bags that still fill a lot of Asian grocery bays.

That packaging choice aims at a real shopping split. H Mart still carries the rice, gochujang, and frozen cakes many families already know how to cook. Target is where someone who has never said “tteokbokki” out loud might pick up a cup because the label already translated it into something familiar.

Seo grew up in Sandy, a Salt Lake City suburb that remains mostly white. He has said he was often the only Asian kid around, embarrassed to invite friends over because of how his mother’s cooking smelled, and embarrassed when his parents spoke Korean at home. The brand he is building now asks strangers to walk toward the food he once tried to hide.

His partner, Dok Kwon, immigrated from Korea as a child and spent years at Goldman Sachs and Citadel, where he has said he managed about half a billion dollars before leaving finance. He later helped scale Cupbop, the Salt Lake City Korean barbecue-in-a-cup chain founded by Junghun Song, across several states. At Cupbop they learned how Korean food travels when the customer did not grow up eating it. Korean Bros is the same idea in a microwaveable cup.

The company launched under its current name in January 2026, but the product work started earlier. In mid-2024, Kwon and his partners put a nearly unbranded prototype on Amazon. Within a few months, Kwon says, it became the bestseller in its category, ahead of cups from Bibigo, Nongshim, and Samyang Foods. That ranking comes from the founders, not from an audited grocery report. Even so, it gave them enough confidence to put a real brand on the pouch and start calling buyers at national chains.

Seo brought the public campaign style he had used as a Utah Valley University creator, when he chased and eventually landed a collaboration with YouTuber MrBeast. This time he aimed the chase at grocery chains. Utah Business, which profiled the company in late September, reported that his “Walmart pls collab” videos drew about half a billion views across Instagram and TikTok. While those clips ran, the team also messaged Walmart buyers on LinkedIn and later demonstrated the product at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Social attention can open a meeting. It cannot protect a product once a buyer redraws the aisle. Kwon has watched influencer drinks surge and then fade, and he argues that Korean Bros has to be a product people reorder, with marketing around it, rather than a camera stunt attached to a sauce packet. On the rice cakes themselves, the team traveled to factories in Korea until they found a plant that beats the dough three times so the cakes stay soft after reheating. The process costs more. They decided the texture was worth putting their names on.

Utah is part of the strategy, not a hometown accident. Asians make up about 3 percent of the state, and Korean residents number around eleven thousand. Kwon’s argument is simple: if the cups sell among ordinary American grocery traffic in Utah, they can sell in North Dakota, not only in Koreatown. Los Angeles and New York can make a launch look bigger than it is. A quieter market shows more quickly whether anyone comes back for a second cup.

The broader category is helping them. Circana, which tracks grocery scanner data, told CNBC in May 2026 that sales of Asian grocery items rose from $1.57 billion in 2021 to more than $2.31 billion. The wider ethnic aisle has been running near $8.8 billion. Buyers already know more shoppers are buying these products. They still remove what does not move.

Asian American packaged-food brands have lived that pattern. Names have sprinted into Target and Whole Foods, then thinned out after an acquisition or a quiet reset of the shelf set. Omsom, the sauce-kit brand started by Vietnamese American sisters Vanessa and Kim Pham, largely disappeared from stores after a 2024 sale. Brooklyn Delhi, Chitra Agrawal’s Indian condiment line, has had to ask customers for support when Whole Foods dropped jars from a new assortment. A loud first week does not guarantee a lasting hook.

Seo says Korean Bros is not trying to dominate the Asian aisle. The company wants to make the bay feel less intimidating, so a shopper who would normally skip it stops and looks. If that works, quieter brands behind the bright cups get an easier path too. For Korean American families who already cook this food, the smaller win may matter more: the cup sits near the mac and cheese, and nobody has to explain the word at checkout.

If you have a Target nearby, see whether the cup is on the shelf, and whether the hook is empty a week later. That is the trial talking. Walmart remains unfinished business. September trade coverage described nationwide commitments for both retailers, while Seo’s own updates still describe Walmart as an active chase. Either way, the next assortment decision will weigh what left the store more heavily than how many views got the brand through the door.

Store counts, unit volumes, and Amazon rankings in this piece come from founder comments and trade press, including Utah Business and company updates, not a single audited retail file.