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The term, “bespoke”, means specially made for a particular person’s taste and needs.
It came from “been spoken for” meaning customized manufacturing.
Originally started with clothes and shoes, bespoke is now evolving across all industries,
including electric appliances and food.
In Korea, personal characteristics are gaining greater importance in
“the ultra-personalization era” and this has affected the demand and supply of
goods being more segmented to fit personal needs than ever.
The food industry is no exception. “Personalized nutrition” has become
an industry buzzword recently, and maybe we are at the dawn of the so-called
“bespoke food” age.
A person’s nutritional need varies by lifestyle, environment, and genetic factors.
Understanding and eating the right source of nutrition they need or lack is one of
the most efficient ways to stay healthy and improve their quality of life.
The pandemic made health an important issue to many people and population aging
is accelerating, leading to the fast growth of the medical food industry for those who
need more health care, such as the elderly and patients. According to the Ministry of
Food and Drug Safety, the medical food market has more than doubled
from KRW 78 billion in 2019 to KRW 164.8 billion last year.
The government sees medical food as a prospective industry, taking aggressive steps to
foster the medical food market. In particular, we have the standards for
special medical purpose foods and many food businesses are competitively making
a foray into the medical food market especially targeting diabetics and cancer patients.
Also, the fast advancement of big data and AI enables us to easily check and find
the right nutrition for us.
The pilot distribution of “personalized health supplements” is a good example.
These health and functional foods are sorted and combined for sale to individual consumers
customized to their lifestyle, health, dietary habits, and genetic test results they request.
In this sense, the theme of the International Food Forum this year is very opportune:
Advent of the Personalized Nutrition Age.
The forum will start with a keynote lecture by Lee Myoung-sook, a professor of food and
nutrition at Sungshin Women’s University. followed by three sessions.
I would also like to convey my profound gratitude to all the other speakers who will share
with us great presentations on the topics of Growth of the medical food market, Future of
personalized food services, and Pet food also goes personal.
I hope you will enjoy these lectures and get valuable insight and useful information for
the development of the food industry from this event.
Thank you.
President, The Financial News
Byun, Dongshik