The Republic of Franchises: Where Every Meal Tastes the Same

In Korea, food is more than nourishment — it is memory, ritual, and language. Street corners once echoed with the hiss of pans and the scent of something unmistakably local: a family's jeon recipe, a region’s version of gukbap, a neighborhood twist on red bean bread. Today, those street corners increasingly offer the same things in the same packaging, served by different people wearing the same aprons.

No figure embodies this shift more than Baek Jong-won. Celebrated as a culinary reformer, he has built an empire on the promise of accessible taste and business know-how — franchising not just food, but a model of revival. Through television and redevelopment projects, his reach has extended into markets once defined by unpredictability and personality.

But what happens when flavor is no longer discovered but replicated? When "helping the local" means replacing its identity with a branded system? Standardized menus may reduce risk, but they also erase difference. And in that erasure, something essential is lost — not just in food, but in who gets to make it, how, and why.

Standardized Taste, Centralized Power

Uniform flavor has its appeal — especially in a society where time is scarce and expectations are high. A consumer walking into a franchise in Daejeon knows exactly what they’ll taste, just as they would in Seoul or Ulsan. But that sense of safety and efficiency doesn’t come free. It is built on a tightly controlled system, one that favors consistency over character, and compliance over creativity.

To achieve this kind of sameness, franchises must design for obedience. Recipes are not shared, they are enforced — down to the weight of each garnish and the size of the side dish spoon. Ingredients are sourced through head office pipelines, often at inflated prices, leaving franchisees unable to adjust or substitute based on season, region, or taste. Deviating from the standard — even slightly — can result in penalties or threats of contract violation. What seems like culinary “support” is often a method of centralizing economic control.

The result is not just uniform menus but uniform labor. The cook is no longer a craftsperson, but a handler of pre-measured components. The owner of the store holds no creative license, only a lease on the brand’s identity. Even the design of the shopfront — colors, fonts, plating, music — is prescribed. This is not entrepreneurship in the classical sense. It is operational outsourcing in which the franchisee bears the business risk, while the franchisor collects reliable returns.

And this model scales. The more outlets that conform to the central recipe, the more power accrues to the top. From a distance, the map looks like a celebration of food democracy — the same warm dish available to all, everywhere. But up close, it reveals a deeper consolidation: of supply chains, pricing decisions, customer data, and ultimately, taste itself.

Standardized flavor does more than flatten culinary experience — it reorganizes power in the food economy. What disappears in the process is not just the regional note or the creative tweak, but the very possibility of local authorship. A thousand shops do not mean a thousand ideas. They often mean one recipe, scaled — and sold — a thousand times.

Franchise as a System of Extraction

Entrepreneurship may begin as freedom, but the system is engineered for extraction.

The word “entrepreneur” still carries romantic weight in Korean society — the hopeful image of an individual building something of their own. In franchise marketing, this image is carefully curated and sold. Prospective shop owners are told they’re joining a “proven system,” one that minimizes risk while maximizing potential. In truth, many are entering a structure where autonomy is illusory and profits are designed to flow upward.

From the outset, the terms are heavily imbalanced. Franchisees pay large sums up front — not just for the brand name, but for mandatory construction, equipment, signage, and interior design, all of which are often sourced through franchisor-affiliated companies. This initial investment doesn’t build equity in the business itself; it purchases access to someone else’s system.

Once open, the dependency deepens. Shop owners are locked into exclusive supply contracts, forced to purchase ingredients, packaging, and tools at prices far above market rate. Even seemingly neutral costs — like marketing fees or promotional campaigns — are unilaterally set by headquarters but paid by franchisees. There is no opt-out. When sales dip, obligations remain: royalties, rent, mandated renovations, seasonal menu updates.

Crucially, the risk of failure rests entirely with the franchisee. The franchisor, by contrast, often collects fixed fees regardless of individual store performance. This means a franchise network can be financially successful even as a large percentage of its shops operate at a loss or quietly close. The model functions not on the long-term success of individual stores, but on the steady recruitment of new entrants — each one bearing the hope of independence, and the burden of structural risk.

This is not entrepreneurship in any meaningful sense. It is financial extraction under the guise of opportunity. The franchisee is not a business partner, but a channel — a conduit through which branded systems generate cash flow without bearing accountability. The moment they falter, there is always another would-be owner ready to buy into the dream.

Legal Gray Zones and Power Asymmetry

The law promises protection. The reality delivers little.

For most independent franchise owners in Korea, the fine print is more threatening than the competition. At first glance, the country's legal framework appears to support small business operators: franchise regulations are on the books, and public institutions promise oversight. But beneath that surface lies a landscape of loopholes, lopsided contracts, and selective enforcement — one where legal protection is more symbolic than structural.

Everything begins with the contract. The franchise agreement, drafted unilaterally by the franchisor, functions less as a partnership document and more as a tool of control. These agreements are often dense with legalese, difficult to negotiate, and written to grant the brand headquarters broad discretion. They govern everything — from the supplier you must use, to the posters you must hang, to the discounts you must offer. Even seemingly minor violations can become grounds for punishment or termination.

Franchisees may discover too late that their designated “exclusive territory” isn’t truly protected. Brands frequently open additional outlets nearby, diluting the original store’s customer base. Franchisors can force costly renovations or impose mandatory seasonal menu changes. And if a franchisee pushes back, they risk retaliation in the form of contract non-renewal — or worse, litigation they cannot afford.

Though Korea’s Fair Trade Commission oversees franchise law, it acts more as a complaint processor than a watchdog. Investigations are slow. Penalties are modest. Legal recourse is expensive and emotionally taxing — an uphill battle for individuals going up against corporate legal teams. As a result, many abuses go unreported, or are settled quietly under duress.

What emerges is a quiet but powerful hierarchy: the franchisor owns the brand, the rules, and the leverage. The franchisee owns the debt, the stress, and the daily grind. The imbalance is not only economic — it is institutionalized. The very structures meant to mediate this relationship instead entrench it, often under the guise of contractual freedom.

In this arrangement, the language of entrepreneurship becomes a kind of legal fiction — freedom framed on paper, but hollow in practice.

The Baek Jong-won Model — Branding Without Accountability

When media trust becomes a license for unchecked expansion.

Few figures in Korea have reshaped the food landscape as dramatically as Baek Jong-won. He is a rare hybrid: chef, educator, media personality, and CEO of one of the nation’s most expansive franchise empires. To many, he is a reformer — a man who “democratized flavor,” who taught struggling restaurant owners how to survive. But to others, his model represents the very problem it claims to solve: a system that rewards scale over soul, uniformity over originality.

Baek’s empire, operated largely through The Born Korea, extends across dozens of brands and thousands of locations — from quick-service noodles to casual pubs. But the growth model is not culinary. It is infrastructural. The food is made consistent through centralized logistics, standardized menus, and franchised interiors. The speed of replication is the real product.

Much of this was made possible through media. Baek’s television appearances — especially those centered on “reviving” local eateries — granted him a kind of public moral authority. He was seen not just as a businessman, but as a benevolent fixer. This image helped accelerate trust, soften scrutiny, and shield the system from the kind of critical questioning that might follow other large corporations.

But even good intentions cannot erase structural incentives. When Baek’s companies roll out new brands or signature dishes, they do so with industrial force: branding, logistics, recruitment, replication. The infamous “deopjuk incident” — in which a local shop’s concept was echoed in one of Baek’s brands — sparked public backlash, not because it was illegal, but because it revealed the power imbalance at the heart of the system. The ability to appropriate, reproduce, and scale an idea faster than its original creator could defend it — that is the real engine of franchise dominance.

To critique Baek Jong-won is not to doubt his personal charisma or popular appeal. It is to examine how systems of influence operate when brand, trust, and regulation all bend in one direction. In his case, the line between reform and replication has blurred. His success is no longer a story about food — it is a story about media-enabled consolidation in the name of culinary development.

The Numbers Behind the Myth

A system built to survive doesn’t mean its participants do.

For aspiring small business owners, franchises offer a seductive promise: a safety net. A pre-designed model, recognizable brand, supply chain support — all sold as insulation against the chaos of starting from scratch. But dig into the data, and a different picture emerges — one not of stability, but of churn.

According to data from the Korea Fair Trade Commission and the Small Enterprise and Market Service, over 50% of food-related franchises shut down within five years. For independent restaurants, the rate is similarly high — but here’s the difference: franchise closures are often not signs of systemic failure. They are features of the system’s sustainability. The brand survives precisely because individual stores can be replaced.

Franchisors continue to collect revenue from new entrants. Upfront fees, mandatory supply purchases, and advertising contributions flow steadily — even if individual outlets struggle or close. A high turnover rate doesn’t harm the brand. In fact, it can be part of the strategy: constantly onboarding new operators sustains the cash flow without requiring franchise-wide reform or innovation.

Meanwhile, the average profit margins for food franchisees are narrow and declining. Once fixed costs — rent, labor, supplies, and franchising fees — are deducted, many owners operate on thin margins. Surveys from industry research bodies routinely find that a significant portion of franchisees earn less than minimum wage for their labor, with no legal recourse to improve their terms without risking contract termination.

The myth of the franchise is that it offers independence with support. In reality, it offers dependence with risk — the illusion of being your own boss, while operating under someone else’s rules, costs, and limitations. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as intended: to generate predictable income for the brand, while leaving uncertainty with the shop owner.

What appears stable from the outside is, for many on the inside, a balancing act — one that ends not with success, but with quiet closure, mounting debt, and the search for yet another business to try.

When Everything Tastes the Same, What Else Have We Lost?

What is flavor, if not memory? What is a meal, if not a story — told through region, rhythm, and risk?

In Korea today, food has become one of the most visible casualties of sameness. As soon as something succeeds — a recipe, a restaurant, a street food cart — it is retooled for franchising. Local nuance is trimmed for scale. Creative hands are replaced by standardized workflows. The joy of discovering a dish once made only in one neighborhood now comes prepackaged, replicated across hundreds of locations, predictable to the last grain of salt.

We call this progress. But what are we progressing toward?

A society that eats the same food, in the same setting, under the same signage may be efficient, but it is not free. It is not curious. It is not alive in the ways that food — at its best — has always been: spontaneous, experimental, rooted in place and people. When flavor becomes system, and risk is absorbed only by the most vulnerable, we are not building opportunity. We are closing it down.

The problem is not franchising itself. It is the logic behind it — the belief that success must scale, that culinary value lies in replicability, and that entrepreneurship means entering someone else’s architecture. That logic produces a landscape where power is held by the few, creativity is rented by contract, and consumers unknowingly eat the same idea, again and again.

We must ask harder questions. Not just “how can we grow a food business,” but:

• Who should own taste?
• What kind of differences do we want to preserve?
• And is uniformity — across every city, menu, and mealtime — really what happiness looks like?

A diverse society eats diversely. A thoughtful one makes space for failure, for oddity, for the slow evolution of something that cannot — and should not — be scaled.
In food, as in culture, difference is not a threat. It is the very thing worth protecting.