An analysis on the production cost and marketing margin of food: Tofu and Kimchi

Abstract

Many Koreans have the question about the price of food: whether the price of Korean food is reasonable or not? Even though some previous studies tried to discuss and analyze the price system of Korean food, few papers clearly present the implication about production cost or marketing margin of processing food. The purpose of this paper is to measure and analyze the production cost and marketing margin of tofu and kimchi, which are one of the main food in Korea, through the raw-data of FIS, KAMIS, and other data from Korean business area. The results of studies present a few findings as follows: First, the proportion of labor cost in the production cost is very important factor and need to be decreased for the lower consumer price. Especially, the lower proportion of labor cost in kimchi industry should be important issue, even though the reduction of proportion of labor cost in kimchi industry is not easy in the real world. Second, each marketing channel of processed food shows different marketing margin. Therefore, Korean government need to increase the level of competition of marketing channels, which makes each business is forced to decrease the marketing margin to survive the market competition in Korea