Kimchi Club is an Australian food brand, creating healthy and delicious Korean food with premium Australian ingredients. We embrace the best of Korean traditional methods and flavours, adapting them for Australian palettes and produce.
Our products are for people who delight in food culture and in Korean culture. For people who care about what they eat; for the young and young at heart.
From humble beginnings, today you can buy our kimchi, condiments and now our authentic Korean sauces, in over 150 gourmet stores and independent supermarkets right across Australia.
Kimchi Club is 100% South Australian made and owned.
Minka Park
Our founder
We’re a group of Korean women who’ve made our home in Australia. Inspired by the premium local produce and our new home’s multicultural spirit, we’re sharing the best of our traditional food and culture with Australia and the world.
Our founder Minka Park moved from her native Seoul to Adelaide in the year 2000. Growing up Minka loved to help her mum and aunties with family food events, making a great variety of Korean food – especially kimchi. Her memories of making hundreds of kimchi with family and neighbours during Kim-jang (김장철), the annual kimchi festival season, are a special recollection she has always treasured.
While her career in Australia encompassed hospitality management and the creative sector, Minka still enjoyed making delicious seasonal kimchi and other Korean dishes for her Australian family’s pleasure and gut health, regularly sharing these with friends and neighbours too.
Over time Minka met other migrant Korean mums facing the same challenges she had, living and working in a new country. In 2017 Minka was inspired to start Kimchi Club, to share Korean food and culture with all Australians and to provide work opportunities for Korean women.
Kimchi Club is a wholly migrant female owned business. We’re grateful for the opportunities we’ve received and take seriously our responsibility to lift up others. Our selection as a Coralus (formerly SheEO) is both a validation of our impact focus and an enabler for us to scale our impact significantly.
We are committed to supporting measurable, positive change through our focus on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals #2 and #8.
Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
As we scale our business we’re focused on making our nutritious and beneficial plant-based products as affordable as possible, in order to make them available to a wide and diverse audience. At the same time we strive to educate the community on the positive health impacts of a probiotic and prebiotic rich diet.
As well as focusing on nutrition, we strive to support local, sustainable agriculture, through sourcing our ingredients from independent local organic producers and suppliers wherever possible.
Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Providing decent work for migrant women was a key motivation in the founding of Kimchi Club. In 2021 we provided over 2,000 hours of safe and empowering work for migrant women who may otherwise struggle to find employment opportunities due to language barrier, lack of networks and confidence. As we grow we will be able to help more migrant and local women in need.