SEOUL — A traditional market may look like the opposite of a franchise. One is built around independent merchants, uneven storefronts and local habits. The other is normally associated with standardized products, identical signage and operating manuals.
But Korea's traditional markets may be becoming one of the more interesting places to create a different kind of franchise: the local franchise.
The opportunity is not to turn an entire traditional market into a chain. It is to identify products, operating ideas and customer experiences that already work inside the market, standardize only the parts that need to be standardized, and allow those concepts to grow outside their original neighborhood.
Tongin Market already offers a clue
Tongin Market, located in Seochon near Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, contains more than 70 shops, with food and grocery merchants forming a large part of the market.
Its best-known feature is the Dosirak, or lunchbox, café system. Visitors exchange money for traditional brass tokens known as yeopjeon, walk through participating stores, select small portions of food, and assemble their own meal.
Introduced in 2012, the system is interesting from a business perspective because no single merchant owns the entire customer experience.
The market effectively connects multiple independent operators through a common payment mechanism, common destination branding and a shared dining experience.
That is not a franchise in the legal sense. But operationally, it contains several ideas that modern franchise systems use: common customer acquisition, recognizable branding, agreed operating rules and cross-selling between participating businesses.
Traditional markets could become franchise laboratories
A conventional franchise company normally develops a concept first and then searches for customers and locations.
A successful traditional-market merchant often works in the opposite direction.
The merchant already has customers. The product has been tested thousands of times. Prices have been tested against real competitors only a few meters away. Recipes, sourcing and labor requirements have evolved through years of daily operation.
In other words, the market has already performed much of the early-stage product testing that a startup would normally have to finance.
This suggests a new development path:
Traditional market → successful stall → branded store → standardized operating model → local franchise.
What could actually be franchised?
| Traditional-market asset | Potential scalable model | Franchise potential |
|---|---|---|
| Signature street food | Small-format kiosk or takeaway shop | High |
| Banchan and prepared foods | Neighborhood deli / meal shop | High |
| Regional specialty products | Packaged food and retail brand | High |
| Bakery, rice cake and traditional snacks | Shop-in-shop or compact specialty store | High |
| Market dining experience | Multi-vendor food hall or curated market | Medium to High |
| Fresh produce | Subscription, delivery or neighborhood store | Medium |
| The entire traditional market | Standardized national chain | Low — local identity should remain |
Tourism changes the equation
Traditional markets are also benefiting from another major structural change: Korea is increasingly being consumed as an experience rather than simply as a shopping destination.
According to Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the country received 18.93 million international visitors in 2025, exceeding the previous pre-pandemic record. Food was one of the dominant activities among international visitors.
This gives market merchants something that many small retailers do not have: exposure to both domestic customers and an international customer base.
A visitor who discovers a particular dumpling, rice cake, sauce or snack in Seoul, Busan or Jeonju can later become a customer at another location, an airport store or an online shop.
Traditional markets therefore have the potential to function not only as retail spaces, but also as brand discovery platforms.
The Korean government is already moving toward 'local'
Government policy is also shifting from simple physical renovation of markets toward branding, tourism and local content.
For 2026, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups structured its cultural-tourism market program around four types: cultural hubs, tourism-linked markets, local-community markets and specialty-product markets. Around 47 markets are scheduled for cultural-tourism support, while approximately 362 markets and shopping districts are targeted for management-support programs.
Separately, Korea's local-brand and 'glocal commercial district' programs have been supporting entrepreneurs that combine local culture, products and physical spaces into recognizable commercial districts.
The important next step may be connecting these two policies more directly: market revitalization and franchise development.
A 'Market Born' brand could be valuable
Instead of hiding the origin of a small merchant once it expands, the origin itself can become part of the brand.
A label such as:
Born in Tongin Market — Seoul
Born in Gwangjang Market — Seoul
Born in Jagalchi — Busan
could communicate provenance in the same way that regional food brands use geographic identity.
This is especially relevant to overseas expansion. A generic Korean snack store may be easy to copy. A product associated with a real market, merchant family and neighborhood has a much harder story to reproduce.
But standardization can also destroy what made the business successful
There is an obvious danger.
If every successful stall becomes a brightly lit 50-store chain with identical menus, the very authenticity that attracted customers in the first place can disappear.
Traditional markets should therefore not be treated simply as inexpensive sources of new franchise concepts.
The better model may be selective standardization.
Food safety, recipes, purchasing, training, packaging and accounting can be standardized. Store design, neighborhood interaction and some product selection can remain local.
This is different from the twentieth-century franchise model, where duplication was the objective.
For a new generation of local franchises, recognizable identity may matter more than perfect uniformity.
The merchant also has to become a franchisor
There is another obstacle that is frequently underestimated.
Making excellent tteokbokki, dumplings or side dishes does not automatically mean that the owner can operate a franchise headquarters.
A scalable business needs recipes that can be measured, suppliers that can handle volume, training procedures, trademarks, quality-control systems, POS data, logistics and sufficient margin for both headquarters and franchisees.
Once a business begins operating as a franchise in Korea, it also enters the regulatory framework governing franchise businesses, including requirements relating to registered disclosure documents and information provided to prospective franchisees.
This means that a promising market merchant may need an external operating partner rather than simply capital.
A new role for market associations
Market associations could also evolve.
Instead of concentrating mainly on facilities, festivals and promotions, some could operate shared infrastructure for emerging brands:
- central purchasing and logistics;
- shared kitchens and food-safety facilities;
- brand and trademark support;
- e-commerce and delivery;
- franchise consulting;
- multilingual packaging;
- tourism marketing; and
- short-term test stores outside the market.
A merchant could then remain independent while using the market as a platform for expansion.
From market stall to micro-franchise
The most interesting opportunity may not be another 500-store Korean franchise.
It may be a network of small businesses with five, ten or twenty stores, strongly connected to their place of origin.
A famous market dumpling shop might operate six neighborhood stores. A Busan fish-cake producer could run compact stores in major railway stations. A regional rice-cake merchant might supply shop-in-shop counters rather than full restaurants.
These would be relatively small franchises by traditional industry standards, but collectively they could form a large new segment of Korea's retail economy.
SOHOFRANCHISE View
The future opportunity is not to franchise Korea's traditional markets. It is to franchise what those markets have learned.
Traditional markets contain decades of accumulated knowledge about food, sourcing, pricing and neighborhood customers. At the same time, tourism, digital payments and local-brand policies are bringing new consumers into these old commercial spaces.
Tongin Market illustrates the possibility particularly well. Independent merchants remain independent, while a common market identity and shared customer experience connect them.
The next step could be to identify the strongest concepts inside such markets and help them travel — first to another neighborhood, then another city, and potentially another country.
If Korea can combine the authenticity of the traditional market with the operating discipline of franchising, a surprisingly modern business model may emerge from one of the country's oldest forms of retail.