Food and dining corporations are shutting down the online ingredient malls they have run in-house one after another and moving to restructure their business portfolios.
Food conglomerate Daesang said on the 3rd it will end services for the ingredient-focused online mall "Beston" (Beston) at noon on the 31st. It comes about 4 years and 7 months after the company rebranded its existing online mall "Zerofood" as Beston in Feb. 2022 and expanded its product lineup.
Daesang said the service shutdown is "to focus on strengthening its core competitiveness in line with its ingredient business strategy and business structure reorganization."
Daesang's operating profit on a consolidation basis last year was 170.6 billion won, and net profit was 75.7 billion won. Compared with the previous year, they fell 3.6% and 21.7%, respectively.
While it is halting online mall operations, the 11 offline ingredient marts "Bestco" (Bestco) will continue to operate as before.
Daesang entered the ingredient distribution market in 2010 by establishing the subsidiary "Damool FS." In the same year, it changed the company name to "Daesang Bestco" and expanded related businesses.
Ingredient distribution and group catering corporation CJ Freshway is also ending operations of its own online mall. It plans to end operations of the ingredient mall "Fresh&" (Fresh&) at 2 p.m. on the 29th of next month, which debuted in Nov. last year.
CJ Freshway plans to restructure its business-to-business (B2B) online business around "Sikbom," an open-market platform for ingredients where it became the largest shareholder through an equity investment in Feb., replacing Fresh&.