What: Seoul's three leading department store flagships, Lotte Jamsil, Shinsegae Gangnam and The Hyundai, are drawing close to half of their new customers from shoppers in their 20s and 30s, largely through food halls and pop-up events.

Why it is important: Korean operators are managing food and pop-ups as a dedicated discipline, with in-house trend teams and event volumes up 36.7% in a year, to keep pace with ever shorter trend cycles.

Shoppers in their 20s and 30s are driving new-customer growth at Seoul's leading department stores. Between January and September, new customers made up 38.4% of visitors to The Hyundai, and 47.4% of them were in their 20s and 30s, up 1.8 percentage points year on year. At Shinsegae Gangnam, the same age group accounted for 48.9% of new customers.

Food halls are the main entry point. Among first-time visitors to The Modern Food Hall, 78% were in their 20s and 30s, and 79% of these younger visitors bought other products. Purchases by customers in their 20s rose 73% at Shinsegae Gangnam's food hall, while F&B sales to new customers in their 20s and 30s grew more than 45% at Lotte World Mall in Jamsil.

Hyundai Department Store runs a "Food Insight Lab" of 20 to 30 buyers and food staff who scout popular restaurants and social media, supplemented by regular sessions with academics and F&B experts. Global brands are following the traffic: Chipotle chose Shinsegae Gangnam for its second Korean store.

Pop-ups amplify the effect: the three flagships hosted 2,160 events in 2025, up 36.7% on 2024, and a Pokémon pop-up drew more than 80,000 visitors in August.

IADS Notes: The food-hall strategy described at Seoul's three leading flagships builds on a sustained investment in food as a traffic driver. Hyundai Department Store's partnership with Le Bon Marché's La Grande Épicerie placed more than 400 French gourmet products, 300 of them private label, in its food halls alongside themed events (The Chosun Daily, March 2026). Korean operators had already begun extending the same logic beyond food, with Shinsegae, Lotte and Hyundai expanding cultural centres to increase dwell time, Lotte explicitly aiming its art classes at younger customers (Korea JoongAng Daily, October 2025). The pattern extends well beyond Korea: Selfridges, John Lewis, Liberty and Harrods are using food halls, workshops and scarcity-led formats to compete for consumers' leisure time rather than routine purchases (The Retail Bulletin, July 2026), while Simon Property Group attributes its rising footfall and sales per square foot to Gen Z shoppers and experiential investment (Fashion Network, May 2026). The Seoul data adds measurement to the trend: younger first-time visitors enter through food and pop-ups, and a large majority go on to buy elsewhere in the store.

Food halls and pop-ups draw customers in their 20s and 30s to Seoul department stores