From the water used to cook rice to in-store preparation, everything has changed... A convenience store's bold bid to replace restaurants - 경향신문
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On the 28th at BGF Food's Jincheon Food Center in Jincheon County, North Chungcheong Province, a company representative scans a product barcode on the Smart Cooker. Provided by BGF Retail
On the 28th, at BGF Food's Jincheon Food Center in Jincheon County, North Chungcheong Province. When the barcode of the 'Spicy Bulgogi Pita Bread' was scanned on the Smart Cooker, which combines microwave, oven, and air-fryer functions, the cooking time was automatically set to 3 minutes 30 seconds. After opening the package and placing it in the Smart Cooker, pressing the start button first ran it in microwave mode. After 30 seconds, it automatically switched to air-fryer mode, and the cooking finished three minutes later.
This Smart Cooker stores about 1,000 cooking programs. It is a device CU developed in-house to deliver the best possible taste for convenience-store frozen foods by optimizing cooking methods. After a merchandise planner (MD) studies each product and presets the optimal cooking sequence and time, consumers can scan that product's barcode on the Smart Cooker to have it cooked exactly as the MD preset. Tasting frozen chicken and frozen pizza prepared in a microwave versus the Smart Cooker, the versions cooked in the Smart Cooker were crisper.
CU co-developed this device with a Chinese appliance maker. It took nearly a year to develop both the unit and its recipes. CU plans to introduce about 500 units first, focusing on university areas and neighborhoods dense with studio apartments, and aims by 2028 to replace all in-store microwaves with Smart Cookers.
On the 28th at BGF Food's Jincheon Food Center in Jincheon County, North Chungcheong Province, automated equipment in the triangular gimbap process places fillings on the rice. Provided by BGF Retail
CU's focus was on how to improve taste, even slightly, across the entire process from factory production to the moment consumers eat. They sought ways to keep rice from hardening even after cold-chain distribution and to prevent frozen foods from becoming soggy. Im Hyeong-geun, head of the product division at BGF Retail, said, 'We are moving with the idea that convenience stores should play the role of replacing restaurants,' adding, 'We are working to connect manufacturing technology to in-store cooking technology so we can keep expanding the range of meals you can experience at a convenience store.'
To improve the taste of rice, they focused on water. The hardness of the ordinary water used in the existing manufacturing process was 50~120㎎/ℓ. Using a softener to reduce minerals such as calcium and magnesium in the water, they lowered the hardness to below 5㎎/ℓ. This method emerged after about ten months of research into how to let moisture penetrate rice grains better so the rice stays moist over time. Starting with that day's production, CU applied rice cooked with soft water across all rice-based ready meals, including gimbap, triangular gimbap, and lunchboxes. In the company's internal tests, the firmness measurement of soft-water rice stored at 10 degrees in refrigeration for two days was about 21% lower than rice cooked with regular water.
At the manufacturing stage, they are also pursuing automation to maintain consistent taste and quality. Because ready meals are relatively light, even slight variations in the weight of some ingredients can create large differences in taste and quality. BGF Food plans to raise its current automation rate of about 15% to 30% within three years.
On the 28th at the gimbap process line at BGF Food's Jincheon Food Center in Jincheon County, North Chungcheong Province, workers in work clothes place ingredients one by one on the rice. Provided by BGF Retail
The Jincheon Food Center produces ready meals such as gimbap, triangular gimbap, and sandwiches sold at CU convenience stores. It can produce up to 360,000 meals per day.
The level of automation differed by the type and number of ingredients in each product. For triangular gimbap, which uses relatively few ingredients and has a simple process, most steps from production to packaging were automated; but on the regular gimbap line, which has many fillings, workers were placing perilla leaves, tuna, burdock, and ham on the rice one by one. Hong Gi-Young, head of production at BGF Food, explained, 'Gimbap contains many different items, which makes automation difficult, so we automated from the packaging stage.' Even among triangular gimbap, when the filling is meat, the particle size is large, making weight control by machine difficult, and the high oil content increases viscosity, so automation is challenging.
There are also issues to solve in stores. After high-temperature cooking with the Smart Cooker, its internal temperature must be sufficiently lowered with the 'cooling function' before the next customer can use it. CU said the temperature drops to around 80 degrees in about two minutes, posing no problem for use. In a demonstration, however, the temperature did not fall to room temperature even after several minutes, so the cooling function kept running. Because the door can be opened even while the oven or air-fryer mode is operating, safety accidents also seemed a concern. CU said that when it introduces the second-generation product next year, it will add a high-temperature lock function and shorten the cooling time.
