How America got hooked on h Mart. What began as a Korean specialty market four decades ago is now a billion dollar grocery empire with an obsessive footy following by Adam Chandler read aloud by Mark Leidorf. The Friday before Labor Day isn't thought of as a blockbuster day for in person retail. In truth, it's mostly thought of as a day to escape the trappings of life. But it's eleven a m off Exit sixteen of the New Jersey Turnpike, and hundreds of people have issued the beaches of the Jersey Shore or the Hampton's to gather at the American Dream Mall. They've set no to the salt water, taffy and sunscreen, and yes to zealous shoppers and underparented kids, all to stand in clumps. There's a clump in line for pearl milk tea, and a clump around a pastry case full of guava Danish and Tarot cream bread. A passing mall walker in a visor inserts herself into a clump near a face painting station to find out what all the fuss is about. Everyone has gathered. She learns to celebrate the opening of a food court. This food court is nos Borrow or missus Field's Fair. Rather, it's designed by h Mart, the Korean American grocery chain whose stores have become a culinary and cultural obsession over the past decade. The hard to find glories on offer in its aisles can take the form of gochugaru and jackfruit, or shin ramyune instant noodles and Dalgona coffee, all of which have become fixtures among the legacy recipe developers and TikTok creators alike. Today, Casual references to h Mart can be found in the precious recipe headnotes of bon A Petite Dinners, as well as the workaday shopping lists on the food Networks site. When Michelle's honor, lead singer of the indie pop band Japanese Breakfast wanted to title her twenty twenty one memoir about grief and belonging Crying in h Mart, the marketing team at Knopp Publishing House didn't flinch. The best selling book is now being adapted into a movie. While plenty of privately held, family run grocery chains such as Wegmans and HB have cultivated fandoms for their private label lines or specialty sandwiches. H Mart's assent reflects more than just a better or more affordable version of what most Americans already shop for. The company's expansion across the US has coincided with decades of demographic shifts in which Asian Americans have become the fastest growing group, and South Korean culture in particular has given rise to juggernauts in pop music and beauty. That American infatuation with all things Korean helps explain why, as h Mart told The New York Times last summer, roughly thirty percent of the specialty grocer's shoppers are now non Asian. We've been anticipating this opening for months, says Brian Kadak, a twenty something who, along with his brother Mark, had been waiting for the date to be unveiled. We saw the post on Instagram two or three days ago and I was like, we're going ads Mark a green and gold dragon Master painted on his face. Their plan, they explain, is to try something from each of the eleven food court stalls next to the mall's H Mart grocery store, all chosen by a curator from h Mark corporate. There are Porgogi beef brisket heroes developed by a Michelin winning chef to split Korean hot dogs on a stick coated in flame, and hot Cheetos batter to be inhaled and seafood noodles to be slurped. To kick things off, though, Brian swings by the food court's sprawling bar for a pre lunch time jet to Jedju, a cocktail named for the beloved South Korean island Paradise. Although Mark has already forgotten exactly what he ordered, a white peach and sojew something. They make it clear that this fraternal mission to suck the marrow out of H Mart's every offering will become a ritual pilgrimage. We're going to take a lot of friends over here, says Brian, while a massive food court located beneath a sixteen story tall indoor ski slope inside the nation's second largest mall might be the most barnum expression of the Korean chain. H Mart as a destination is hardly a new concept, yet, with so many American food habits driven by thrift, speed and convenience, H Mart stores are in aberration. They're neither cheap nor particularly streamlined. There are no self checkout lines or stacks of bulk items or overly fancy apps. The layouts and offerings can vary wildly from store to store, but with one hundred plus outposts across the US, Canada and the UK more than one billion dollars in annual sales, the steady tailwinds of social media and major grocers cribbing from its playbook, it's worth asking will h Mart change how we shop? The answer, of course, is that it already has. The original h Mart still operates in the shadow of the Seven Trains elevated tracks in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens, New York. The shop, opened by Ilion Kwan in nineteen eighty two on the bottom floor of a squat pre war apartment building, was not the much to look at. Kwan, the son of a farmer from rural South Korea, had arrived in the US a few years earlier and began importing Asian food staples such as cooking oils and starchier rices to sell to the immigrant communities settling nearby. By nineteen ninety nine, the business had nine locations, mainly in the Tri State area and was known for its prepared dishes. A regular refrain among h Mart's early loyalists was that they were feeling homesick for ingredients and would travel long distances to find them. Quan stores shortened that distance. That original store still retains of plastic basket modesty. It looks like any other medium sized badega with a few narrow aisles, except you'll find dozens of varieties of seaweed snacks, bags of rice in a wide range of sizes from two pounds to forty styles and colors sweet to mild, to jasmine to black, and a small ceramic oven in the corner producing fresh roasted sweet potatoes sold in brown paper bags. On the front window, a vinyl sign reminds you that this h Mart, like all H Mart's, is open three hundred and sixty five days a year. The h Martz story might have ended with that first shop at Kwan not met Elizabeth, who'd become his wife shortly after opening. Elizabeth, who grew up two blocks away, would join him in plotting H Mart's expansion, designing its locations, and leading its marketing operations. Eventually, their daughter Stacy, who grew up bagging groceries in the Queen's store would take charge of creating h Mart's new food halls, which evolved from a few simple stalls in the chain's older stores into the buzzy entities they've become. And though the Kwan's son Brian initially resisted the pull of the family business moving to Seoul at one point, he eventually came home to select and import the retailer's cornucopian inventory. To day, the four family members lead the company as an interdependent unit consisting of three co presidents and Illy as chief executive officer, a minor miracle considering that he and Elizabeth divorced more than twenty years ago. They tend to run it guided by instinct and experimentation rather than data and deliberation. A family business obviously has pros and cons says Jenna Wong, h Mart's former social media head, the decision making process, I'll say it could be easy or sometimes it could be without reason. There's a sense that if they're happy, it should be done that way because they're all the owners. The company also remains media averse. Aside from a few anodyne statements at store openings, Hmart management reveals very little about its inner workings. The Quan family company marketing reps and several employees declined requests to speak with Bloomberg BusinessWeek. H Mart's apparent distaste for self promotion can be found in its lack of advertising. The closest it has to ads as a weekly circular and in its original Queen's store, more than four decades after its opening. The only tell that it was the launch pad for a grocery empire is a small plaque on its exterior. Up until a remodel in twenty twenty three, the sign above its entrants didn't even say h Mart. It featured its original name, the phrase han Areum in English and Hangoul lettering, translating to an armful of groceries in Korean. It wasn't until the late oughts that han Areum made its nickname h Mart official, shifting from a hard to translate Korean name to something primed for the mainstream. Some store signs, previously only in the native language began to appear in English. I remember going and basically only speaking Korean, says Sarah Juan, who as a kid would accompany her immigrant mom on the forty minute drive to the nearest store in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Years later, in twenty nineteen, Juan got a job in h Mart's marketing department and was shocked by the range of shoppers. There were so many non Asian people. We'll be right back with How America Got Hooked on h Mart. Welcome back to How America Got Hooked on h Mart. In his book The Secret Life of Groceries, journalist Benjamin Lord traces the birth of the modern American grocery store to the general stores made iconic by frontier Westerns. Options there tended to be few. An armful of groceries, a fistful of dollars. The paradox in the birth of h Mart is that its items were basics that could also be categorized as specialty goods, given their scarcity among American distributors. Rice cookers and aluminum lined ramen pots, certain cuts of meat or soup bones, chilis, lemongrass, tofu, and fish sauce were run of the mill pantry items for some shoppers and exotic rarities for others, And much like general stores, h Mart first grew by popping up in places where these items were needed the most. In nineteen ninety seven, after fifteen years in business and with five stores in New York and New Jersey, h Mart leaped hundreds of miles south to open its sixth location in Falls Church, Virginia. The Korean population in Fairfax County, where Falls Church sits trails only that of Greater Los Angeles and New York. The county's Economic Development Authority operates a business office in Seoul, and Virginia schools are required to include the term the East Sea when referring to the Sea of Japan in textbooks, a nod to South Korean geopolitical preferences. In twenty twenty two, Irene Shin, the first Korean American woman to serve in Virginia's four hundred year old House of Delegates, helped pass a bill to officially mark Kimchi Day to celebrate the communal jarring and fermentation of vegetables following the annual harvest. I don't understand, Shinn says, with a mix of pride, genuine confusion, and slight suspicion. Kimchi used to be a weird thing that we would only need at home, But now if you go to Costco, they have kimchi. If you go to Trader Joe's, they have kimchi, and to think that it's culturally really cool. At the False Church store, I'm joined by one of my relatives who refuses to be named because she's never been to an h Mart before and suspects that admission is something to be embarrassed about. As we roam the aisles, we admire the dragon fruit, Golden Kiwi, Durian, and jelly sodas. Like most H Mart stores, the Falls Church location boasts a seafood section lined with blue tanks that team with live fish of all sizes, as well as lobsters and crabs. It's a hallmark of Asian markets and also popular among parents searching TikTok for ways to entertain their kids without schlepping them to an aquarium, as well as guys who've run out of ideas for dates. The boom of Korean pop culture exports from Parasite to squid Game to BTS, and the popularity of h Mart have in some ways propelled each other. One named Korean yogurt Smoothie featured into the plot of the popular Netflix teen romcom To All the Boys I've Ever Loved Before in twenty eighteen, viewers sussed out that it was actually made by the Japanese brand Yakult, one of the many non Korean Asian brands that h Mart carries, and promptly emptied store shelves of it. Then there are moments in which h Mart has intentionally ridden the wave. When a dish called Japaguri was trending because of parasite, the company created Jappaguri meal kits and displayed them in store entrances. The retailer has also leaned in to where it's very online. Younger fans flock h Mart shares recipes for the cooking curious on social media, particularly appealing to those who want to blend Asian food staples with dishes they already love, like kimchi spaghetti or kimchi grilled cheese. Once people tried it and liked it, they would post about it like, oh, I didn't know you could eat kimchi with this, and does that really taste good? Let me try it, says one who left the company in twenty twenty two. There was definitely a lot of testing going on online when people were home bound during the pandemic and wanted to learn about more traditional dishes. The company produced social media tutorials in English on Korean basics, such as how to make bibbimbop or fried rice feeding. The social media beast has paid off. Now, products including kimchi and instant ramen, which was a billion dollar Korean export for the first time in twenty twenty four, are constantly featured in genre defying recipes by social media creators. All of this has only bolstered the perception that h marts are destinations unto themselves. According to a recent American time use survey by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, an average grocery trip takes more than forty minutes these days, a finding that efficiency scolds chuck up to an overload of options, followed by consumer paralysis. But at h Mart, the influencer's whisper an errand can become an activity, a hobby, a pleasure. Even the Internet is full of people ogling at H Mart's fabled snack aisles and the treasures of its freezer cases. I a low key feel like I am blacking out and it is just too early for that, but I am already obsessed with this store, goes the narration on a first visit to h Mart. Tik Tok video, seen more than one and a half million times. Almost a decade after experts said millennials were shunning supermarkets, perhaps permanently, in favor of dining out or ordering in, the grocery store has become a playground for those seeking out luxurious and hard to find foods. The moment that breaks my shopping partner's brain at the Falls Church h Mart unfolds when we reach an aisle with more than fifty varieties of soy sauce. As we stand there, struck dumb by this bounty, a father and his young son and daughter appear in the aisle. The elementary school ag boy, who later introduces himself as Francis, sprints over to pluck a bottle of Pearl river Bridge soy sauce off the shelf. Before they can move on, we ask them how they decided on that brand. As it turns out, the family, who's white, had a soy sauce tasting competition at Francis's most recent birthday party, and Pearl river Bridge was the winner. We made stir fry noodles and then we just tasted them, Francis's father explains, my wife, my brother in law, my dad, my mom thought we were all nuts. We had so much fun. In the years since h Mart first opened, Americans of Asian descent have surged from one point five percent to seven percent of the population, and the retailer has sought out the communities that best reflect that growth. From two thousand and four to two thousand and nine, for example, four h Martz opened in cities outside Atlanta, Doraville, Duluth, John's Creek, and Suwanee, two of them in Gwinnett County, which now promotes itself as Sool of the South because of its booming Korean population. As the company's footprint in the US has grown, so has the size of its stores. By twenty twenty one, it had more than fifty stores across a dozen states, mostly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. That year, it opened its first San Francisco location, a forty seven thousand square foot behemoth that soon took over the space once used by a twenty four hour fitness next door, adding an additional twenty seven thousand square feet. Then last year, the company went from anchor tenant to owner, buying the entire strip Mall for thirty seven million dollars. As the stores get bigger, h Mart is careful to go for mass appeal without sacrificing the hallmarks of many Asian grocers. Having open bins of fish balls or live scallops on ice, and uncooked chicken or pork in self service containers might give some shoppers pause, but they remain non negotiable parts of the experience. We don't want to be the dentrified store, Brian Kwan told The New York Times in twenty twenty one. In some places, its stores now function as both the specialty and general grocer. Before h Mart arrived in San Francisco's Mersed Extension Triangle, the area had gone six years without a grocery store. Now, the retailer stalks its shelves in a way that appeals to everyone. Beyond the counch meat and pig ears and a kimchi case roughly twice as long as its dairy section. There are plenty of Western specialties, including the San Francisco brand It's It, whose ice cream sandwiches are considered an American culinary treasure by many in the Bay Area. H Mart always changes, adopts and adjusts according to communities requirements. An h Mart spokesperson told a local San Francisco journalist in twenty nineteen, whereas the Koreatown store in Manhattan resembles a neighborhood Korean market, the Houston h Mart feels more like a global bazaar, with Korean, Filipino, Chinese, and Western food secttions, along with a stage for country music performances. Increasingly, h Mart is also succeeding quite literally where other grocery stores have failed. Many of its new stores have been built out of enormous husks once occupied by other supermarkets. A sixty nine thousand square foot former Vaughns in Orange County, California, a sixty four thousand square foot former Stoppin shop in Long Island City, New York. During the pandemic two faltering Albertson's in Irvine, California, became fifty thousand square footers, and earlier this year, out of a dead Kmart in Utah, rose a one hundred thousand square foot store, Hmart's biggest. Yet Other grocers are furiously plucking pages from the h Mart manual. This goes well beyond the beef porgogi dumplings at Costco or Walmart's Curious Rahman collaboration with Gordon Ramsay to turn supermarkets into destinations, Even unassuming chain grocery stores are increasingly being kitted out with bars featuring wine and craft beer, spaces for live cooking demos, or franchises of local coffee shops and barbecue chains. Meanwhile, items like sriracha or sofrito, once relegated to a few dusty shelves of a cringe inducingly labeled international or Ethnic foods isle, are beginning to achieve endcap status as annual sales of these segments surge by double digits. In this brave new supermarket model, the only constants are change and kimchi

How America got hooked on h Mart. What began as a Korean specialty market four decades ago is now a billion dollar grocery empire with an obsessive footy following by Adam Chandler read aloud by Mark Leidorf. The Friday before Labor Day isn't thought of as a blockbuster day for in person retail. In truth, it's mostly thought of as a day to escape the trappings of life. But it's eleven a m off Exit sixteen of the New Jersey Turnpike, and hundreds of people have issued the beaches of the Jersey Shore or the Hampton's to gather at the American Dream Mall. They've set no to the salt water, taffy and sunscreen, and yes to zealous shoppers and underparented kids, all to stand in clumps. There's a clump in line for pearl milk tea, and a clump around a pastry case full of guava Danish and Tarot cream bread. A passing mall walker in a visor inserts herself into a clump near a face painting station to find out what all the fuss is about. Everyone has gathered. She learns to celebrate the opening of a food court. This food court is nos Borrow or missus Field's Fair. Rather, it's designed by h Mart, the Korean American grocery chain whose stores have become a culinary and cultural obsession over the past decade. The hard to find glories on offer in its aisles can take the form of gochugaru and jackfruit, or shin ramyune instant noodles and Dalgona coffee, all of which have become fixtures among the legacy recipe developers and TikTok creators alike. Today, Casual references to h Mart can be found in the precious recipe headnotes of bon A Petite Dinners, as well as the workaday shopping lists on the food Networks site. When Michelle's honor, lead singer of the indie pop band Japanese Breakfast wanted to title her twenty twenty one memoir about grief and belonging Crying in h Mart, the marketing team at Knopp Publishing House didn't flinch. The best selling book is now being adapted into a movie. While plenty of privately held, family run grocery chains such as Wegmans and HB have cultivated fandoms for their private label lines or specialty sandwiches. H Mart's assent reflects more than just a better or more affordable version of what most Americans already shop for. The company's expansion across the US has coincided with decades of demographic shifts in which Asian Americans have become the fastest growing group, and South Korean culture in particular has given rise to juggernauts in pop music and beauty. That American infatuation with all things Korean helps explain why, as h Mart told The New York Times last summer, roughly thirty percent of the specialty grocer's shoppers are now non Asian. We've been anticipating this opening for months, says Brian Kadak, a twenty something who, along with his brother Mark, had been waiting for the date to be unveiled. We saw the post on Instagram two or three days ago and I was like, we're going ads Mark a green and gold dragon Master painted on his face. Their plan, they explain, is to try something from each of the eleven food court stalls next to the mall's H Mart grocery store, all chosen by a curator from h Mark corporate. There are Porgogi beef brisket heroes developed by a Michelin winning chef to split Korean hot dogs on a stick coated in flame, and hot Cheetos batter to be inhaled and seafood noodles to be slurped. To kick things off, though, Brian swings by the food court's sprawling bar for a pre lunch time jet to Jedju, a cocktail named for the beloved South Korean island Paradise. Although Mark has already forgotten exactly what he ordered, a white peach and sojew something. They make it clear that this fraternal mission to suck the marrow out of H Mart's every offering will become a ritual pilgrimage. We're going to take a lot of friends over here, says Brian, while a massive food court located beneath a sixteen story tall indoor ski slope inside the nation's second largest mall might be the most barnum expression of the Korean chain. H Mart as a destination is hardly a new concept, yet, with so many American food habits driven by thrift, speed and convenience, H Mart stores are in aberration. They're neither cheap nor particularly streamlined. There are no self checkout lines or stacks of bulk items or overly fancy apps. The layouts and offerings can vary wildly from store to store, but with one hundred plus outposts across the US, Canada and the UK more than one billion dollars in annual sales, the steady tailwinds of social media and major grocers cribbing from its playbook, it's worth asking will h Mart change how we shop? The answer, of course, is that it already has. The original h Mart still operates in the shadow of the Seven Trains elevated tracks in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens, New York. The shop, opened by Ilion Kwan in nineteen eighty two on the bottom floor of a squat pre war apartment building, was not the much to look at. Kwan, the son of a farmer from rural South Korea, had arrived in the US a few years earlier and began importing Asian food staples such as cooking oils and starchier rices to sell to the immigrant communities settling nearby. By nineteen ninety nine, the business had nine locations, mainly in the Tri State area and was known for its prepared dishes. A regular refrain among h Mart's early loyalists was that they were feeling homesick for ingredients and would travel long distances to find them. Quan stores shortened that distance. That original store still retains of plastic basket modesty. It looks like any other medium sized badega with a few narrow aisles, except you'll find dozens of varieties of seaweed snacks, bags of rice in a wide range of sizes from two pounds to forty styles and colors sweet to mild, to jasmine to black, and a small ceramic oven in the corner producing fresh roasted sweet potatoes sold in brown paper bags. On the front window, a vinyl sign reminds you that this h Mart, like all H Mart's, is open three hundred and sixty five days a year. The h Martz story might have ended with that first shop at Kwan not met Elizabeth, who'd become his wife shortly after opening. Elizabeth, who grew up two blocks away, would join him in plotting H Mart's expansion, designing its locations, and leading its marketing operations. Eventually, their daughter Stacy, who grew up bagging groceries in the Queen's store would take charge of creating h Mart's new food halls, which evolved from a few simple stalls in the chain's older stores into the buzzy entities they've become. And though the Kwan's son Brian initially resisted the pull of the family business moving to Seoul at one point, he eventually came home to select and import the retailer's cornucopian inventory. To day, the four family members lead the company as an interdependent unit consisting of three co presidents and Illy as chief executive officer, a minor miracle considering that he and Elizabeth divorced more than twenty years ago. They tend to run it guided by instinct and experimentation rather than data and deliberation. A family business obviously has pros and cons says Jenna Wong, h Mart's former social media head, the decision making process, I'll say it could be easy or sometimes it could be without reason. There's a sense that if they're happy, it should be done that way because they're all the owners. The company also remains media averse. Aside from a few anodyne statements at store openings, Hmart management reveals very little about its inner workings. The Quan family company marketing reps and several employees declined requests to speak with Bloomberg BusinessWeek. H Mart's apparent distaste for self promotion can be found in its lack of advertising. The closest it has to ads as a weekly circular and in its original Queen's store, more than four decades after its opening. The only tell that it was the launch pad for a grocery empire is a small plaque on its exterior. Up until a remodel in twenty twenty three, the sign above its entrants didn't even say h Mart. It featured its original name, the phrase han Areum in English and Hangoul lettering, translating to an armful of groceries in Korean. It wasn't until the late oughts that han Areum made its nickname h Mart official, shifting from a hard to translate Korean name to something primed for the mainstream. Some store signs, previously only in the native language began to appear in English. I remember going and basically only speaking Korean, says Sarah Juan, who as a kid would accompany her immigrant mom on the forty minute drive to the nearest store in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Years later, in twenty nineteen, Juan got a job in h Mart's marketing department and was shocked by the range of shoppers. There were so many non Asian people. We'll be right back with How America Got Hooked on h Mart. Welcome back to How America Got Hooked on h Mart. In his book The Secret Life of Groceries, journalist Benjamin Lord traces the birth of the modern American grocery store to the general stores made iconic by frontier Westerns. Options there tended to be few. An armful of groceries, a fistful of dollars. The paradox in the birth of h Mart is that its items were basics that could also be categorized as specialty goods, given their scarcity among American distributors. Rice cookers and aluminum lined ramen pots, certain cuts of meat or soup bones, chilis, lemongrass, tofu, and fish sauce were run of the mill pantry items for some shoppers and exotic rarities for others, And much like general stores, h Mart first grew by popping up in places where these items were needed the most. In nineteen ninety seven, after fifteen years in business and with five stores in New York and New Jersey, h Mart leaped hundreds of miles south to open its sixth location in Falls Church, Virginia. The Korean population in Fairfax County, where Falls Church sits trails only that of Greater Los Angeles and New York. The county's Economic Development Authority operates a business office in Seoul, and Virginia schools are required to include the term the East Sea when referring to the Sea of Japan in textbooks, a nod to South Korean geopolitical preferences. In twenty twenty two, Irene Shin, the first Korean American woman to serve in Virginia's four hundred year old House of Delegates, helped pass a bill to officially mark Kimchi Day to celebrate the communal jarring and fermentation of vegetables following the annual harvest. I don't understand, Shinn says, with a mix of pride, genuine confusion, and slight suspicion. Kimchi used to be a weird thing that we would only need at home, But now if you go to Costco, they have kimchi. If you go to Trader Joe's, they have kimchi, and to think that it's culturally really cool. At the False Church store, I'm joined by one of my relatives who refuses to be named because she's never been to an h Mart before and suspects that admission is something to be embarrassed about. As we roam the aisles, we admire the dragon fruit, Golden Kiwi, Durian, and jelly sodas. Like most H Mart stores, the Falls Church location boasts a seafood section lined with blue tanks that team with live fish of all sizes, as well as lobsters and crabs. It's a hallmark of Asian markets and also popular among parents searching TikTok for ways to entertain their kids without schlepping them to an aquarium, as well as guys who've run out of ideas for dates. The boom of Korean pop culture exports from Parasite to squid Game to BTS, and the popularity of h Mart have in some ways propelled each other. One named Korean yogurt Smoothie featured into the plot of the popular Netflix teen romcom To All the Boys I've Ever Loved Before in twenty eighteen, viewers sussed out that it was actually made by the Japanese brand Yakult, one of the many non Korean Asian brands that h Mart carries, and promptly emptied store shelves of it. Then there are moments in which h Mart has intentionally ridden the wave. When a dish called Japaguri was trending because of parasite, the company created Jappaguri meal kits and displayed them in store entrances. The retailer has also leaned in to where it's very online. Younger fans flock h Mart shares recipes for the cooking curious on social media, particularly appealing to those who want to blend Asian food staples with dishes they already love, like kimchi spaghetti or kimchi grilled cheese. Once people tried it and liked it, they would post about it like, oh, I didn't know you could eat kimchi with this, and does that really taste good? Let me try it, says one who left the company in twenty twenty two. There was definitely a lot of testing going on online when people were home bound during the pandemic and wanted to learn about more traditional dishes. The company produced social media tutorials in English on Korean basics, such as how to make bibbimbop or fried rice feeding. The social media beast has paid off. Now, products including kimchi and instant ramen, which was a billion dollar Korean export for the first time in twenty twenty four, are constantly featured in genre defying recipes by social media creators. All of this has only bolstered the perception that h marts are destinations unto themselves. According to a recent American time use survey by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, an average grocery trip takes more than forty minutes these days, a finding that efficiency scolds chuck up to an overload of options, followed by consumer paralysis. But at h Mart, the influencer's whisper an errand can become an activity, a hobby, a pleasure. Even the Internet is full of people ogling at H Mart's fabled snack aisles and the treasures of its freezer cases. I a low key feel like I am blacking out and it is just too early for that, but I am already obsessed with this store, goes the narration on a first visit to h Mart. Tik Tok video, seen more than one and a half million times. Almost a decade after experts said millennials were shunning supermarkets, perhaps permanently, in favor of dining out or ordering in, the grocery store has become a playground for those seeking out luxurious and hard to find foods. The moment that breaks my shopping partner's brain at the Falls Church h Mart unfolds when we reach an aisle with more than fifty varieties of soy sauce. As we stand there, struck dumb by this bounty, a father and his young son and daughter appear in the aisle. The elementary school ag boy, who later introduces himself as Francis, sprints over to pluck a bottle of Pearl river Bridge soy sauce off the shelf. Before they can move on, we ask them how they decided on that brand. As it turns out, the family, who's white, had a soy sauce tasting competition at Francis's most recent birthday party, and Pearl river Bridge was the winner. We made stir fry noodles and then we just tasted them, Francis's father explains, my wife, my brother in law, my dad, my mom thought we were all nuts. We had so much fun. In the years since h Mart first opened, Americans of Asian descent have surged from one point five percent to seven percent of the population, and the retailer has sought out the communities that best reflect that growth. From two thousand and four to two thousand and nine, for example, four h Martz opened in cities outside Atlanta, Doraville, Duluth, John's Creek, and Suwanee, two of them in Gwinnett County, which now promotes itself as Sool of the South because of its booming Korean population. As the company's footprint in the US has grown, so has the size of its stores. By twenty twenty one, it had more than fifty stores across a dozen states, mostly in the Northeast and on the West Coast. That year, it opened its first San Francisco location, a forty seven thousand square foot behemoth that soon took over the space once used by a twenty four hour fitness next door, adding an additional twenty seven thousand square feet. Then last year, the company went from anchor tenant to owner, buying the entire strip Mall for thirty seven million dollars. As the stores get bigger, h Mart is careful to go for mass appeal without sacrificing the hallmarks of many Asian grocers. Having open bins of fish balls or live scallops on ice, and uncooked chicken or pork in self service containers might give some shoppers pause, but they remain non negotiable parts of the experience. We don't want to be the dentrified store, Brian Kwan told The New York Times in twenty twenty one. In some places, its stores now function as both the specialty and general grocer. Before h Mart arrived in San Francisco's Mersed Extension Triangle, the area had gone six years without a grocery store. Now, the retailer stalks its shelves in a way that appeals to everyone. Beyond the counch meat and pig ears and a kimchi case roughly twice as long as its dairy section. There are plenty of Western specialties, including the San Francisco brand It's It, whose ice cream sandwiches are considered an American culinary treasure by many in the Bay Area. H Mart always changes, adopts and adjusts according to communities requirements. An h Mart spokesperson told a local San Francisco journalist in twenty nineteen, whereas the Koreatown store in Manhattan resembles a neighborhood Korean market, the Houston h Mart feels more like a global bazaar, with Korean, Filipino, Chinese, and Western food secttions, along with a stage for country music performances. Increasingly, h Mart is also succeeding quite literally where other grocery stores have failed. Many of its new stores have been built out of enormous husks once occupied by other supermarkets. A sixty nine thousand square foot former Vaughns in Orange County, California, a sixty four thousand square foot former Stoppin shop in Long Island City, New York. During the pandemic two faltering Albertson's in Irvine, California, became fifty thousand square footers, and earlier this year, out of a dead Kmart in Utah, rose a one hundred thousand square foot store, Hmart's biggest. Yet Other grocers are furiously plucking pages from the h Mart manual. This goes well beyond the beef porgogi dumplings at Costco or Walmart's Curious Rahman collaboration with Gordon Ramsay to turn supermarkets into destinations, Even unassuming chain grocery stores are increasingly being kitted out with bars featuring wine and craft beer, spaces for live cooking demos, or franchises of local coffee shops and barbecue chains. Meanwhile, items like sriracha or sofrito, once relegated to a few dusty shelves of a cringe inducingly labeled international or Ethnic foods isle, are beginning to achieve endcap status as annual sales of these segments surge by double digits. In this brave new supermarket model, the only constants are change and kimchi