▲ Gung Traditional Rice Cake / CEO Oh Ki-suk

Since long ago, rice cake has been loved by many Koreans. Grains and tools needed to make rice cake have been found in numerous neolithic sites and variety of kinds were added through the times of the Three Kingdom era, Unified Silla, Goryeo Kingdom and the Joseon dynasty. 

Korean rice cake, however, has a drawback: difficulty to digest for some people. Thus introduced was jeungpyeon or sultteok made of makgeoli (Korean rice wine) dough. There are number of soltteock: kiju, kijeong and kiji. Kiji among them has been exclusively made in Gyeongsang Province and people call it jankiji-tteok due to its small size. 

Gung Traditional Rice Cake

At Gung Traditional Rice Cake, jankiji-tteok is made in the traditional fermenting method from redwood rice cake steamer. CEO Oh Ki-suk uses low sugared red bean dregs with 100% domestically grown newly harvested rice. In other words, people with indigestion when eating rice cake can enjoy as much as they can without a worry. 

It is notable that jankiji-tteok has no additives, colorings or chemical substances. Also it can be stored in high temperature for 3 days as well as in frozen to defrozen in a microwave or electric rice cooker later. For this reason, the news of jankiji-tteock is being widely spread on social media among rice cake lovers.

Franchise

CEO Oh started franchise June last year with made-on-the-day policy. Customers can book a visit to see how jankiji-tteok is made and then purchase. For those who wish to join the business as partner, Oh runs a distribution team for effective deliverance of ingredients and management system. 

25 stores of Gung Traditional Rice Cake are currently in business nationwide at the moment. Alongside work-life balance, Oh has made it compulsory that all stores must close business at 6pm in order to keep quality of products and efficiency of staff rolling. 

"Our practice of health and safety is strict and we are currently working to obtain HACCP. It is our goal to expand the number of stores to more than 50 and I'm ambitious to see markets overseas when things are ready" says Oh.