Korean meat board to promote ‘family-style’ dining culture to help win business deals

South Korea's Hanwoo Board is deploying a major marketing campaign for Hanwoo premium Korean beef in Hong Kong, one of the world's leading global business centres. The board’s campaign aims to create awareness for a "family-style" dining culture of sharing high-quality beef grilled over a communal charcoal plate, which recent studies show has a “measurable positive impact” on business negotiations.

The family-style dining culture is widely practiced in Korea as means to improve or enhance business negotiations. Hanwoo cited a paper authored by Professor Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell University and Professor Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago, published in the journal Psychological Science. The paper revealed how meals shared family-style from central platters can greatly improve the outcome of subsequent business negotiations. The research team found that executives eating a shared meal were able to reach a positive deal on average 34% faster than those who ate individual meals.

One of the most iconic examples of this type of shared food culture can be found in another study titled "The Korean Beef Story: The History of Meat-eating Culture and the Identity of the Korean People" (2016), conducted by Professor Seong Gyeong-il at Kangwon National University, where he revealed the dining practice of grilling high-quality marinated beef on a brazier being popular among noblemen during Korea's Joseon dynasty (1392–1897).

Thus, Korea's rapid economic expansion in recent decades has seen this food culture spread to all levels of society, and now friends, families, and business associates gathering to eat charcoal-grilled cuts of prime beef has become one of the most iconic aspects of modern Korean food culture. 

Professor Seong's analysis concludes that sharing meat while sitting around a charcoal grill is reminiscent of hunting in ancient times and therefore likely appeals to the fundamental human emotion of social harmony and bonding, Hanwood said.

Underscoring the popularity of this trend, recent market data shows a marked increase in the number of Korean restaurants serving premium Korean beef in Hong Kong, Hanwoo said.The 2017 Overseas Korean Restaurant Survey revealed that the number of Korean restaurants in Hong Kong jumped annually from 111 in 2014, to 297 in 2016, and 418 in 2017. Many of these Korean restaurants offer private rooms for business events, which is expected to make a significant contribution to facilitating business negotiations. (compiled by Kristy Tan)