▲ Buddypet / CEO Bumsuk Jo

Pet industry in South Korea is estimated around 3 trillion won ($2.5 billion) and experts predict that the market will keep growing in accordance with increasing number of single households. Pet shops and veterinaries are booming as we see at least one or two of them while we are walking the street. 

Established in 2018, Buddypet is specialized in cat food. The company introduced an automated feeder and the pet snack ‘Catcipe’. Bumsuk Jo, CEO of Buddypet, said “Cats are in need of more protein since they are carnivore. For this reason, Catfish is made of salmon and chicken breast with no artificial sweetener and coloring and it was developed after years of co-research and development of food engineering doctors.”

Also added in Catfish are turmeric, apple, taurine and edible insects that have gone through high temperature sterilization. Catcipe is packed in a spout pouch for safety reason and a 4kg pouch can feed a cat 3 to 4 times. 

Buddypet proved its capability by being chosen for startup voucher R&D pilot project of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and for technology enterprise project of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups. Buddypet also recently has obtained a venture certificate. 

With these excellent achievements as a springboard, Buddypet is preparing a cloud funding started from early this year while working on development of KKOKA (tentative), an app that gives analysis on contents of pet foods. The app also allows consumers leave comments after using a certain product and it is to be loaded with various other functions such as new product alarm and discounts.