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[Why Korea 19] Baedal Minjok — What Did That Name Even Mean, Again?

Delivery rider handing food to a customer on a Seoul street, Namsan Tower in the background

I grew up hearing adults say it all the time.

"We are the Baedal Minjok — be proud of it."

I had no real idea what it meant. I just nodded along, sensing, vaguely, that it was something old and something to be proud of.

And now I really have become part of the "delivery nation." A few days ago, on a stiflingly hot evening, I opened the Baedal Minjok app without a second thought. Then, mid-scroll, I caught myself trying to remember what those five syllables — Baedal Minjok — actually meant. Nothing came to mind. I've opened this app a few times a week for years, and somehow I'd completely forgotten the original meaning packed into its name. I felt a little ridiculous, googling it right then and there.

"Baedal" Originally Had Nothing to Do With Food

The "baedal" here isn't the delivery (配達) we all know — the one that brings fried chicken to your door. It's a different, older word: the one in "Baedal minjok," "Baedal gyeore" — an old name for the Korean people themselves.

The origin is usually traced back to the Dangun creation myth. Traditionally, it's interpreted to mean something like "the bright land," "the land of dawn light in the east." So, in a sense, the story goes: from the very founding myth of the nation, we were already the "Baedal people."

But here's what's actually solid ground. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, the word "Baedal" didn't really surface in written records until surprisingly late — with the rise of the modern religious movement Daejonggyo, and especially during the Japanese colonial period, when it became a keyword for national identity. The real point isn't how ancient the word is. It's that it was a modern identity-word, reclaimed during a time when the country had been taken from its people, as a way of saying: this is who we always were.

Which means that when that older generation told me, "We are the Baedal Minjok — be proud of it," the sentence was carrying more historical weight than I ever realized.

Then, in 2010, this old word came back to life somewhere completely unexpected. The founders cheekily played on the fact that "Baedal (倍達)" — the ancient name for the Korean people — sounds exactly like "baedal (配達)," the everyday word for delivery. Early ads parodied a Goguryeo-era hunting mural — warriors on horseback shooting arrows — except the arrows were swapped for delivery bags. They ran with the fiction that "we've been delivering things since ancient times," and at the time, the campaign landed hard. The tagline "What kind of people are we?" got parodied everywhere for a while, and that irreverent branding fused itself permanently with Korea's delivery culture.

A joke that started as wordplay, fifteen years later, has basically become true. So how did Korea actually become the delivery nation?

A Country Built for Delivery to Thrive

The ground was already fertile by the time the joke became reality — laid down through the industrialization and urbanization of the 1980s and '90s. A small country packed with dense cities. Those cities filled with apartment complexes, where all a rider needs is an address and an elevator to reach your door. A motorcycle delivery network spun like a spiderweb across every neighborhood. Some of the fastest internet in the world. Add Korea's "ppalli-ppalli" (hurry-hurry) culture on top, and you had every condition lined up for delivery to take root.

But conditions alone don't explain an explosion. Between having the right conditions and actually detonating them, there was one more step.

That step was the smartphone, and the delivery app. Before, you had to dig up the phone number for your regular Chinese restaurant or fried chicken joint and call. Now, you open an app and every nearby restaurant appears on one screen — comparing menus, reading reviews, paying, all within a few taps. Delivery went from "something you call in for" to "something you do the second you think of it." Once that friction disappeared, people started ordering far more often than before.

And then the real trigger got pulled. It was COVID.

Korea's food delivery market, tracked separately as its own category starting in 2017, was worth about 2.73 trillion won that year. It grew to 5.26 trillion won in 2018, then 9.73 trillion won in 2019 — and then, in 2020, it jumped to 17.38 trillion won. That's average annual growth of more than 85%.

The exact point where that curve bends upward lines up precisely with when social distancing tightened. According to an analysis by Hana Financial Management Research Institute, delivery transaction volume jumped 23.8% month-over-month in August 2020, during a COVID resurgence, and 34.2% in December, when business-hour restrictions kicked in. The average number of monthly delivery-app orders per person climbed from 4.1 in January 2020 to 5.4 by December 2021, and average monthly spending rose from about 88,000 won to 134,000 won.

So here's the sequence. The soil (dense cities, apartments, motorcycles, blazing-fast internet) was already there. Delivery apps removed the friction of ordering. And then the trigger — COVID and social distancing — went off, detonating every condition that had already been quietly stacking up.

And here's the important part: even after distancing eased and COVID faded, the habit never left. Convenience, once you've gotten used to it, is hard to give up. These days, we open a delivery app for pretty much any reason at all.

That shows up in international comparisons too. Global consumer research firm Dunnhumby surveyed 8,000 consumers across 20 countries affected by COVID-19, and found that 60% of Korean respondents said they used food delivery services — the highest of any country surveyed, more than double the global average of 27%.

So, Why Korea?

People my age grew up learning "We are the Baedal Minjok" as a source of pride. Now we've become the generation that opens a delivery app several times a day. The word originally pointed to us — to our identity — but today it's become so thoroughly absorbed into daily life that forgetting its original meaning, even briefly, doesn't feel strange anymore. Younger generations may never have learned the original meaning at all — they may have grown up knowing these five syllables purely as the name of a delivery app.

Tracing how a joke turned into reality reveals something else: how quickly this country turned conditions it already had into an explosive habit, once a crisis (COVID-era social distancing) hit. And that habit has now become an asset that someone out there badly wants to buy.

But is buying "Baedal Minjok" really just a transaction — one app changing hands? Or is there something bigger going on here?

That's the story I want to pick up next time.

Curious about Korea?

So am I.

Key Takeaways

  • The "baedal (倍達)" in "Baedal Minjok" is a different word from the "baedal (配達)" that means delivery. There's a traditional interpretation linking it to Dangun, but it was really popularized in the modern era as a symbol of Korean national identity. The app's name is wordplay built on the fact that it sounds exactly like "baedal (配達, delivery)."
  • What explains today's delivery boom isn't ancient tradition — it's recent structural conditions (dense cities, apartments, motorcycle and internet infrastructure), the friction that delivery apps removed from ordering, and the trigger: COVID-19.
  • Korea's food delivery market grew more than sixfold in three years, from 2.73 trillion won in 2017 to 17.38 trillion won in 2020 — with transaction volume spiking 20–30% at each point distancing rules tightened.
  • In a 20-country comparison, 60% of Korean consumers reported using delivery apps — the highest rate in the world, more than double the global average.

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