Thursday, April 23, 2015

Yogurt ladies

So there are these brown bags that one sees hanging on doors.

This is across the street from Tek's daycare.
This one is actually on a door inside our apartment entryway, on the first floor.


Here's a close-up:

The URL is www.yakult.co.kr
There is also this lady who is always walking back and forth in the neighborhood pushing a cart. We see her often on the way to daycare in the morning.

Notice the bag hanging from her cart?
We gradually came to the realization that there is an extremely vibrant yogurt-delivery service here. One morning I caught the yogurt lady in action.

Putting yogurt into the brown bag ...
... and flipping it over to the inside of the gate.
The carts don't seem to be motorized, but I think they have some sort of gearing mechanism that makes them extremely easy to push around.


Once we became aware of these yogurt ladies (and they are all ladies), we started noticing them everywhere. They all wear the same distinctive pink jackets. And they are not just out in the mornings; I see them any time of day when I walk around outside. Sometimes the ladies stop in and chat with customers.

Each lady is responsible for a pretty small neighborhood patch of just a few square blocks. Yet somehow an army of them is kept busy all day long. There must be dozens in Gyeongju. It's hard to fathom how much yogurt must be being delivered each day in the city to keep all these yogurt ladies employed full time.

Two yogurt ladies on the same street at the same time.


Yogurt cart "parked" at our apartment complex while yogurt lady makes deliveries.
We've gotten friendly with the one that we see almost daily on the way to daycare. She occasionally slips Tek a little yogurt drink. She also makes sizable yogurt deliveries weekly to his daycare.

A few weeks ago I was watching a New York Times Fashion & Style video featuring the hip Hongdae 홍대 neighborhood in Seoul. And what do you know -- there's a yogurt lady cart going by during an on-the-street interview with a fashionable young student! Check out the video yourself, between 1:25 and 1:33.

This is what I think of as the prototypical Yakult product, a small sweet and sour yogurty drink, just 65ml, for kids.


According to the Wikipedia page, it originates in Japan. But if you go the Korean web site, you'll see they have a fancy line of other products as well, with more sophisticated branding and a marketing pitch related to healthy living. At Tek's daycare, the kind they drink is 7even. (We get charged extra for it based on his consumption.)





8 comments:

  1. I wish I could Like every sentence of this post.

    You saw my Facebook posts back in the winter ("the winter") about R's Yakult addiction?

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  2. Mr SB, I can't believe you actually did post about it. I have tried searching your Facebook posts (within the limited searching capacity fb gives us) for this post, looking up "yakult", "yogurt", "addiction", "obsession" (I misremembered your comment), your child's name, his nickname, and even "R". Turned up nothing about this topic. But did find a number of interesting other posts.

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  3. Now that I think about it, I think it was in a comment in a discussion in the Class of 1543 [date has been changed] group of which Lance is a member. Someone noted enviously that Singapore has flavors that are available nowhere else. I believe I confirmed this by looking on Wikipedia.

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  4. Mr. SB, one can tell by your frequent use of Wikipedia that you are a true scholar. As am I.

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  5. Did you say they have this system of home delivery by yogurt ladies in Japan, too? In two years there, I never noticed it, which means that for me it just blended into other types of food delivery. Why is there a need for yogurt to be delivered at home so often? You can buy it at the store, can't you? And it keeps a while, after all. Oh, I found a web page that makes it sound like this is only in Korea, which makes me feel less oblivious. (http://www.bloomberg.com/ss/08/07/0717_idea_winners/203.htm). The main home delivery or neighborhood sale from a truck stuff I remember in Japan was the roasted sweet potatoes on winter evenings, delicious, sold out of a truck that repeatedly plays a very mournful sounding recording of the word "yaki-imo" (roasted potatoes). And the laundry hanging pole truck, which plays an even more mournful recording over and over lamenting "mono-hoshi-zao" (thing-hanging-pole).

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    Replies
    1. A Japanese friend of ours posted that on Facebook. I never noticed the yogurt ladies in Korea before, either. I think it depends on the kind of neighborhood you live in. I figured the home delivery of yogurt is like the home delivery of milk. We don't have that much in the States any more, but it was once common. The sheer number of yogurt ladies walking around town is baffling, though. It's hard to imagine there is enough demand to support it, but there must be.

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