[News Today] TANGHULU POPULARITY WANES

[LEAD]
Tanghulu. It's a sugar-coated fruit snack that saw a huge popularity last year, at one point, you could see lines of people waiting for these little fruit sticks. But recently, its appeal has diminished, resulting in plummeting sales and increasing closures. Today, we look at the transient nature of such business trends.

[REPORT]
The sign shows this is a tanghulu store but only piles of blankets are sold there.

The tanghulu shop that opened here late last year closed after just six months. it's now temporarily occupied by a bed linen store.

Lee Yeon-su/ Seongnam resident
The store just disappeared one day. I used to have two tanghulu a week, but now I don't eat them at all.

The nationwide popularity of tanghulu, a popular Chinese-style candied fruit snack, fizzled out before long. Subsequently, there are fewer stores and declining sales now.

Together with commercial area analyzer Openub, KBS recently looked into a tanghulu franchise's credit card sales nationwide.

At the height of its popularity in July of 2023, the average sales per store rose to as high as 86 million won, roughly 64,500 U.S. dollars.

But the figure halved in just three months and plunged down to one-eighth of the peak number in less than a year.

With plummeting sales, the number of stores fell dramatically as well.

Owner of a Tanghulu franchise / (VOICE MODIFIED)
We used to sell more than KRW 100 mn (USD 75,000) a month. But now 6-7 of the tanghulu franchise stores closed down.

The black sugar bubble milk tea franchise which had enjoyed a boom earlier also saw its sales dive to one-ninth of its peak in just one year. The same went for a Taiwanese-style sandwich chain. This illustrates that these brands maintained brisk sales for merely a month or two.

Meanwhile, a dessert franchise immune to consumers' rapidly changing palates didn't see much difference in its number of stores and sales over several years.

Prof. Choi Chul/ Sookmyung Women's Univ.
Social media focuses people's attention on them. The stores may do well at first but franchisees would all suffer when the attention dies down.

These sales figures demonstrate that those who don't jump on the popularity bandwagon early to enjoy the short-lived boom would only end up losing money.

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