Discovering Korean food may begin with a drama, a recommendation or an appealing photograph. Making it a personal favourite depends on what happens around the meal.
A cuisine becomes part of someone’s life when they stop needing an occasion to eat it. The first order might be an experiment. Friends suggest trying Korean food. A dish looks familiar from a drama. A colourful bowl catches the eye. Somewhere along the way, however, discovery can become preference. The customer begins remembering a particular flavour, choosing a favourite combination and suggesting the meal to someone else.
That transition from wanting to try something to wanting it again, is where the more interesting customer experience story begins. For a restaurant business, attracting curiosity is one task. Helping customers develop a relationship with the food involves a different set of decisions. How much explanation does a dish need? What makes an unfamiliar menu feel approachable? How does the experience travel home in a delivery bag? And what must remain consistent when the customer returns?
Mahesh Reddy, Co-Founder and CEO of GTGO India, encounters these questions through a portfolio spanning GOPIZZA, Gochujang’s Korean street food, Dalkomi’s Korean desserts and Bibigo Bapsang’s Korean bowls and bites. His account of introducing these formats offers a useful perspective on how a cuisine can find its place in customers’ routines. Some of the most revealing details concern what happens between recognising a dish and enjoying it.
Consider a bowl of bibimbap arriving at someone’s home. Its components may be visually distinct, arranged in a way that makes the meal appealing. Bringing them together is part of the eating experience. A customer trying it for the first time may appreciate knowing how.
Food businesses spend considerable effort preparing a dish; the final steps may belong to the person eating it. Helping that person complete the experience can influence how the meal is understood and remembered. Packaging, in this context, becomes a quiet form of service. It anticipates a question and offers an answer at the moment it becomes useful.
For a new diner, that can make exploration more comfortable. For the business, it helps connect the intended flavour with the experience at home. Reddy places delivery within this wider responsibility. “I feel it is not only the taste it's the entire experience in the delivery which will differentiate us,” he says.
The observation extends the idea of hospitality beyond the outlet. An employee can explain a dish at a counter; a delivery order needs to carry enough clarity with it. What should be mixed? How should the meal be approached? Where can the customer share feedback? These details shape whether the food feels easy to enjoy. They also help customers become more confident in their own preferences.
That confidence matters because familiarity with a cuisine can arrive in stages.
Someone may recognise a dish before tasting it. They may know its name without knowing its portion size. They may have watched it being eaten on screen while still welcoming guidance when it is placed in front of them. He recalls expecting to spend more effort introducing bibimbap. Instead, some customers already recognised it through Korean dramas and arrived with an idea of what they wanted.
For marketers, this is an interesting moment - the customer’s imagination has reached the food before the food reaches the customer. The restaurant then becomes the place where anticipation acquires taste, texture and substance. The experience needs to support that encounter, making room for both enthusiasm and questions.
Visible preparation can help. At Bibigo Bapsang, Reddy describes components being assembled, portioned and garnished in front of customers. He also describes food models that show how a finished bowl will look.
These are practical design choices. They allow customers to understand the meal through more than its name. The portion becomes easier to picture. The composition becomes clearer. An employee can explain the components as the bowl takes shape. For a diner considering something unfamiliar, that visibility can support a more comfortable choice. It gives the customer a role in the experience: observing, asking and deciding.
Design therefore becomes part of how the food is introduced. The counter, display, packaging and conversation all contribute to the customer’s understanding. The same attention to the customer also influences what reaches the menu.
According to Mahesh Reddy, developing Bibigo Bapsang involved about a year of research with customers and teams in India and Korea, including CJ Foods. Feedback varied around sweetness, spice, salt and flavour.
That variation is worth considering. A discussion about adapting food for India can quickly become a discussion about an imagined average customer. Actual tasting sessions reveal individuals with different backgrounds, expectations and appetites for discovery. For a food business, customer understanding involves more than asking whether people like a dish. It means examining the combination, the portion, the context in which it might be eaten and the experience that helps someone appreciate it.
He also specifically emphasised that the team chose to retain an authentic Korean direction, using sauces and ingredients sourced from Korea, while working through portions and combinations. This brings a useful distinction into the conversation about accessibility. Customers can be helped to understand a cuisine through its presentation and service. A clear explanation, a visible portion and a helpful interaction can make a new dish feel approachable while preserving the character that made it interesting.
Once someone discovers a flavour they enjoy, the business takes on another responsibility: making the next encounter recognisable. Interestingly, he identifies sauce as central to that consistency. He describes centralised preparation and distribution to outlets as a way to maintain the taste as operations expand. “The sauce is centralized it is been made on a daily basis and been sent across to outlet because sauce is the main thing which can change the entire taste of the food point of it,” he says.
To the customer, the operational detail resolves into an expectation: the meal they enjoyed should taste familiar when they choose it again. This is where loyalty connects appetite with reliability. A customer remembers more than a dish’s name. They remember how it tasted, whether it felt satisfying and how comfortably the experience fitted into their day.
Repeating those pleasures gives a preference somewhere to settle. The wider portfolio introduces the question of occasion. Bowls, pizza, street food and desserts can occupy different places in a person’s routine. One visit may be about lunch, another about sharing a snack or finishing an evening with something sweet.
For a multi-brand business, this creates opportunities to engage customers across different needs. Whether those opportunities produce repeat visits or movement between brands would require purchasing data to establish. The strategic question, however, is relevant: how can a food offering remain useful as the customer’s occasion changes?
The answer includes the feeling of the place itself. He says the staff are taught Korean greetings and expressions of thanks, while Korean lettering and messages appear in the outlets. Such details can offer different forms of connection. For one visitor, they contribute to discovery. For another, they provide the pleasure of recognition. Their meaning deepens through the service around them. A greeting becomes memorable when it leads into a patient explanation, a comfortable interaction and a meal the customer enjoys.
Mahesh Reddy also further described the collaboration between teams in India and Korea on design and packaging, with room to adapt communication for customers in India. This gives design a role in carrying cultural character while making the practical experience understandable.
Across the account, loyalty emerges as something built through many small acts of clarity and consistency. The customer knows what they are choosing. They understand how to enjoy it. The meal arrives with the guidance they need. A flavour they remember is there when they return. These are the conditions that can help a cuisine become personally meaningful, beyond the excitement of discovering it. Eventually, the customer may stop describing the meal as something they have been meaning to try. They begin describing it as something they feel like eating.
That is when the second order starts to matter….
Disclaimer: All data points and statistics are attributed to published research studies and verified market research. All quotes are either sourced directly or attributed to public statements.
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