Why SPC’s Bread Empire Is Built on a Pattern of Preventable Tragedy

On the morning of May 19, 2025, a 50-year-old woman was killed at an SPC Samlip bakery plant in Siheung, a city in Gyeonggi Province southwest of Seoul. She had been applying lubricant to a conveyor belt when her body became caught in the machine.

SPC Group is one of South Korea’s largest food conglomerates, with an expansive portfolio that includes bakery chains, coffee shops, and snack brands found in nearly every neighborhood. Its products are part of everyday life for millions of consumers. But so, it seems, are the accidents.

As public outrage grows and calls for another boycott resurface, the latest death raises questions that go beyond a single incident. Why do these accidents keep happening? What has failed—laws, leadership, or something deeper? And at what point does a pattern become a system?

Not an Isolated Case: A Recurring Pattern of Risk

The fatal accident in May 2025 was not an isolated event. In October 2022, a 23-year-old contract worker at SPC’s Pyeongtaek factory was killed after being pulled into an industrial sauce mixer. The machine was still running while she was cleaning it—alone, without a co-worker or emergency shut-off protocol in place. That incident led to a wave of public anger and official apologies, yet little seems to have changed since.

Over the past three years, SPC-affiliated plants have reported at least three deaths and several serious injuries involving factory workers. Many of these incidents follow the same pattern: late-night or early-morning shifts, insufficient training, and a lack of basic safety equipment such as interlock systems or two-person work protocols. Government inspections confirm the presence of structural safety negligence, not rare malfunctions.

Labor advocates argue that these are not tragedies born of bad luck but symptoms of a deeper industrial logic—one that values productivity over precaution, cost-efficiency over care. The accidents are preventable. The risk is known. Yet the system repeats itself.

In response to earlier fatalities, South Korea implemented the Serious Accidents Punishment Act (SAPA) in 2022. The law was designed to hold CEOs and senior management criminally liable for avoidable workplace deaths. In theory, it was a turning point. In practice, enforcement has been limited. In SPC’s case, top executives received suspended sentences, while the chairman himself was not charged.

Critics say the law has been defanged by narrow interpretations and corporate shielding. “A law that punishes no one doesn’t change anything,” said one union official. “The law exists, but the culture hasn't moved.”

Beneath the legal documents and corporate statements lie the stories of workers—most of them women, many middle-aged, often invisible. They are not statistics. They are people who woke up early, who took these jobs out of necessity, and who never came home. Each accident reflects a silence, not only in the factory, but in the public record.

Beneath the Brand: Market Power and the Illusion of Choice

“A Bakery on Every Corner—But Only One Owner”

For most consumers in South Korea, SPC is not a name—they know Paris Baguette, Samlip, Dunkin’, Baskin Robbins, Shany, or even Pig in the Garden. What many don’t realize is that these are all owned or controlled by SPC Group, a food conglomerate that commands an extraordinary share of the country’s bakery and processed food markets.

Through a deeply integrated supply chain—spanning manufacturing, logistics, and retail—SPC has become the default supplier for much of the baked goods consumed in everyday life. Its logistics arm, SPC GFS, manages centralized distribution for the group’s brands and affiliated franchises, while subsidiaries like SPL and Shany handle mass production. The company’s dominance is not just in name recognition but in structural positioning: its products are available in nearly every convenience store, supermarket, and rest stop. Its brands are often positioned as competitors, but in reality, they feed into the same corporate center.

This system blurs the line between brand variety and true competition. The result is what economists call a “functional monopoly”—where choice exists only in appearance, and alternatives are either inaccessible or invisible. For consumers, it’s increasingly difficult to avoid SPC products even if they want to—especially in baked goods, where independent bakeries face high costs, real estate pressure, and marketing disadvantages.

That same system has shielded the company from real consequences. Despite waves of boycotts following fatal accidents, SPC’s market share has remained largely intact. Franchise owners continue to operate under the corporate umbrella, caught between public backlash and economic dependence. In effect, the company’s dominance absorbs consumer resistance without yielding structural change.

And so the ethical dilemma deepens. When consumers no longer feel that they have a meaningful choice, they begin to dissociate responsibility. “It’s not like I support the company—I just don’t have time to find alternatives,” one customer told us outside a Paris Baguette in Seoul. This response is not apathy—it is fatigue, born from the exhaustion of trying to live ethically in a system designed to make that effort invisible.

Can the Law Protect the Dead?

“A Law That Exists, But Rarely Convicts”

In January 2022, South Korea enacted the Serious Accidents Punishment Act (SAPA), a landmark piece of legislation aimed at holding corporate executives personally liable for preventable workplace deaths. It was introduced after years of public demand for accountability in a country where industrial fatalities had become alarmingly routine. The law was supposed to mark a turning point—a way to say, finally, that lives lost to negligence were no longer legally invisible.

But in the years since, its impact has proven limited.

In one of the most widely publicized cases, the CEO of an SPC affiliate was convicted under the law following the death of a 23-year-old worker at a sauce-mixing machine. The court imposed a suspended prison sentence—meaning no actual jail time. The chairman of SPC Group, widely seen as the central figure in the company’s decision-making structure, was not charged. Critics argue that the law, while symbolically powerful, has been functionally defanged by narrow interpretations and lenient judicial outcomes.

It is not merely about weak punishment. It is about where the burden of responsibility is placed. Legal accountability tends to stop at the level of mid-tier managers or safety officers—those with formal oversight, but little actual power. The executives who control budgets, timelines, and staffing levels often remain insulated behind layers of legal abstraction. As a result, the chain of accountability is broken at the very point where it should begin.

What’s more troubling is how quickly the system moves on. Production resumes. Apologies are issued. Compensation is offered. The public is told that corrective measures have been taken. But the next accident comes anyway—predictable, preventable, and yet, strangely unprevented. The gap between the law’s promise and its application leaves a moral vacuum: not just a failure of justice, but a failure of memory.

In this vacuum, death becomes normalized as operational risk. When lives lost no longer trigger systemic change, the question becomes not whether a law exists—but whether the society in which it exists is prepared to enforce it in meaningful ways.

The limits of the law are not merely judicial—they are cultural and political. In May 2025, Kim Moon-soo, a presidential candidate and former labor official, publicly criticized the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, arguing that “jailing business owners doesn’t prevent deaths” and calling the law an “unfair burden.”

While framed as pragmatic realism, such statements expose a deeper blind spot: the unwillingness to see industrial deaths as consequences of systemic decisions, not unfortunate mistakes. They reveal a logic in which economic growth remains detached from human safety, and in which corporate leadership is shielded from responsibility, even in the face of repeated loss of life.

Consumption and Complicity

“The Bread Still Sells”

In the days following the most recent SPC factory death, calls for a renewed boycott spread quickly across social media. Hashtags like #BoycottSPC and #NoBloodOnBread reemerged. Some consumers shared brand lists, while others urged popular food influencers to avoid SPC products. For a moment, anger pulsed through the algorithm. But inside convenience stores and coffee chains, the shelves remained stocked—and the bread still sold.

This dissonance has become familiar. South Korean consumers are not indifferent. Many are informed, even outraged. But outrage has limits in a system designed to absorb and redirect it. SPC’s market reach is so expansive that avoiding its products requires significant time, effort, and sacrifice, particularly in neighborhoods where independent bakeries are rare or absent.

For many, the moral choice feels less like a decision and more like a burden. “I want to support the boycott, but my local convenience store has nothing else,” one student said. “It’s either this bread or nothing.” In that moment, ethical intent collides with infrastructural dependency. And that collision leads not only to resignation, but to quiet complicity.

This is not to accuse consumers of apathy. It is to highlight the ways in which systems are built to offload ethical responsibility onto the individual, while shielding institutions from meaningful accountability. The same structure that exposes workers to danger also ensures that the harm is distant, abstract, and easy to forget at the point of sale.

What emerges is a new kind of ethical fatigue—one born not of selfishness, but of exhaustion. The effort to consume ethically feels noble but futile, like carrying water in a sieve. And in the absence of visible alternatives or institutional change, many consumers retreat into silence—not because they don't care, but because they no longer believe that caring is enough.

What We Choose to Remember

Industrial accidents are not new. Neither is forgetting. Every system that produces at scale also produces silence—about the hands that labor, the risks they bear, and the lives lost when those risks are ignored. What sets our time apart is not the number of casualties, but the speed with which we normalize them.

In a society driven by convenience, speed, and profit, memory is a fragile thing. It competes with algorithms, market incentives, and exhaustion. And yet, without memory, there is no accountability.

Philosopher Judith Butler once asked: “Whose lives are considered grievable?” It’s a question that applies here with quiet urgency. When certain deaths—those of night-shift workers, temp staff, and aging women on factory floors—fail to register as national traumas, something more than justice is at stake. What’s at stake is the very architecture of empathy.

The law may be written. The facts may be documented. But without collective will, they remain inert. Accountability is not a static concept—it must be enacted, socially and politically, again and again. It begins not in courtrooms, but in what we choose to remember, and refuse to accept.

There will be more bread. More brands. More apologies. But the question remains: will there also be more death? And if so, how many deaths does it take for a society to treat them not as workplace accidents, but as moral failures?

Because what we tolerate, we authorize. And what we forget, we repeat.