Samyang's Buldak turns extreme spice into a global challenge — 8bn packs by 2025

Samyang Foods invented Korean instant noodles in 1961, but by the 2000s it was a struggling also-ran, still paying off debts from a false beef-fat scandal and the 1997 Asian crisis. The product that turned it around came from a family member's lunch: in spring 2010, Kim Jung-soo watched diners sweat over a spicy chicken stir-fry and told her food scientists she wanted that heat in a ramen. 'My reaction?' recalled the chief food scientist. 'It was, "She's actually going to sell this?"'

Buldak (fire chicken) ramen reached stores in 2012 and initially flopped — retailers and consumers said it was too spicy. But Samyang had aimed it at 'young and audacious people who would challenge themselves with spicy instant noodle for fun', and in February 2014 the British YouTuber Korean Englishman posted a video of friends and family eating the noodles in London: milk sprayed, tongues wiped, sweaters peeled off. The clip drew about 11 million views and set off a worldwide welter of 'fire noodle challenges'.

Samyang leaned into the phenomenon instead of chasing it: it expanded the line into cheese, carbonara, mala and extra-spicy 2x variants, ran production around the clock, and later added halal-certified versions for Southeast Asia. The challenge culture did the advertising — by 2018 there were more than a million fire-noodle challenge videos on YouTube, and American competitive eater Matt Stonie's 15-bowl video alone amassed 145 million views.

The numbers followed: 400 million Buldak packs in 2017, exports climbing from $100M in 2017 to $700M by mid-2024 (90%+ of Samyang's exports), and cumulative sales past 8 billion packs in the first half of 2025 — about a billion packs a year in roughly 100 countries. Samyang's revenue rose from $224M in 2015 to $893M in 2023, around 75% of it from overseas.