Korea's Biggest Coffee Chain Isn't Starbucks

That Korean streets are full of cafés has been said plenty of times. This goes one level down: among all those cafés, whose sign appears most often?

The answer is not Starbucks. There are two reasons for that, and both are worth knowing.

At a glance

The important part of that table is not the top line but the missing one. Starbucks is not in it at all, and the brand leading on revenue per store is fifth on store count. 'Biggest chain' and 'best-earning chain' are two separate contests here.

The store-count map

All four at the top are low-cost brands. What fills the floor of Korea's café map is not premium coffee but the 2,000-won americano.

Why Starbucks is absent from that table

Not because it has few stores. It is counted in a different column.

Starbucks Korea does not franchise; every store is company-operated. So it never enters the Fair Trade Commission's franchise statistics at all. For scale: as of late June 2025 it had 1,937 stores, and has since passed 2,000.

This is not a statistical quirk. It is a difference in business structure.

• Company-operated (Starbucks) — head office opens the store and employs the staff directly. Slower to expand, but less variance between locations
• Franchised (Mega, Compose and others) — the owner supplies the capital; head office supplies brand and logistics. Because the capital comes from outside head office, expansion is far faster

That structure is behind Mega passing 3,000 stores. Small footprints, thin staffing and a takeaway-first layout keep start-up costs low, and low costs push store counts up again. It is also why two branches of the same brand end up close together in one commercial district.

Why only the iced americano escaped a ten-year-overdue price rise

Mega MGC Coffee raised prices on some items from April 21, 2025 — the first increase since the brand launched a decade earlier.

The reason was cost. The company said green coffee prices on international markets had nearly doubled over the previous year while the exchange rate spiked. Arabica bean prices were up roughly 111.57% year on year.

But one item was left off the list.

• Americano (hot): 1,500 → 1,700 won
• Halmega Coffee 1,900 → 2,100 · Halmega Misut Coffee 2,700 → 2,900
• Megaricano 3,000 → 3,300 · Wang Halmega Coffee 2,900 → 3,200
• Iced americano: frozen

With costs rising and every other line touched, leaving this one alone was not incidental. In Korea the iced americano is the item that represents a brand's price list. If that line moves, you are a shop that raised prices; if everything else moves but that line holds, you are a shop that has not.

The company also pointed out that its iced americano is 24oz — about 20% more than competitors' 20oz. Which tells you what the next lever is when price cannot move: volume. (For current prices, the in-store menu board is the accurate reference.)

The word 'eoljuka'

One piece of Korean vocabulary makes this market much easier to read.

얼죽아 (eoljuka) compresses eoreo jugeodo iced americano — "iced americano even if I freeze to death." It names the people who order iced over hot in sub-zero winter. It is used as a joke, but it also describes real consumption.

Behind the decision to exempt the iced americano is the fact that this item sells in all four seasons. If sales collapsed in winter, there would be no reason to protect the price.

The coinage itself follows a Korean pattern: keep the first syllable of each word in a long phrase and drop the rest. It is the same construction as baekku, the word for bag-decorating.

Store count and revenue per store are different games

Read only the store-count table and it looks like low-cost brands own the market. But the highest average revenue per store was Twosome Place, followed by A Bout Coffee, Plus82, Pascucci and Baegeok Coffee.

A brand ranked fifth by store count leading on revenue means there are two separate contests here.

• The store-count game — open small, open many. Earn through turnover and proximity
• The revenue-per-store game — open large, open few. Earn through ticket size and dwell time

This distinction is practical for a visitor because the two games sell different things. The first sells coffee. The second sells a seat. Why a seat carries a price at all is worked out in why there are four cafés on one block.

What this means where you are

Two checks before ordering will prevent most mistakes.

• Screenshot the menu beforehand. Freezing in front of a kiosk screen is the most common failure
• Read size by the stated volume (ml/oz), not by the name. As above, the same "iced americano" is 24oz at one brand and 20oz at another. "Large" means something different at every chain

One more thing worth knowing if you are in Korea for more than a few days. Most of these chains run their own app with a stamp or points scheme, and the low-cost brands lean on them heavily — it is part of how they hold customers without competing on price. Signing up usually needs a Korean phone number, which many short-stay visitors will not have, so treat the posted price as the price you will pay rather than assuming a discount route exists.

Finally, this map doubles as a baseline for price intuition. Take one iced americano as your unit when budgeting a trip to Korea and everything else becomes easier to estimate. That a 2,000-won cup and a 6,000-won cup stand on the same street is itself a description of the Korean consumer market.

Read next

• 'Baekku' — how decorating a bag turned into a market — the same abbreviation grammar as 'eoljuka'
• How convenience stores became a shopping destination for foreign visitors — the same cheap-and-close strategy in another format
• Daiso's 5,000-won clothes — where the psychological price line sits in Korea's low-cost market

Sources

• ZDNet Korea — Mega Coffee leads on store count; Twosome leads on average revenue (Korean)
• ZDNet Korea — Mega Coffee tops coffee franchise store counts; who leads on sales? (Korean)
• Digital Daily — Mega MGC Coffee raises some prices; iced americano frozen (Korean)
• Foodicon — Mega MGC Coffee's first price rise in ten years; iced americano unchanged (Korean)
• Newdaily — Mega Coffee raises the americano from 1,500 to 1,700 won (Korean)