Food & Beverage RetailIn Korea's food halls, rent is a price for traffic.
Food & Beverage Retail/NRG Insights
In Korea's food halls, rent is a price for traffic.
Every food tenant in a Korean department store, airport terminal or highway service area hands part of its takings to the building. The Fair Trade Commission's 2025 survey puts the effective average at 19.1% of sales in department stores, and the government found rest-area tenants paying intermediaries a third of theirs. Read across the public record, the rate is a price for traffic, struck by whichever side needs the other more and shaped by the contract it sits in. As Korea's three largest department-store groups rebuild their food halls, this study follows how that price is set.
In 2024 a department-store food official told a business daily that the store had offered a bakery a place in its food hall for an entry commission of nothing at all, taking the loss in exchange for exclusivity and the crowds the bakery would bring. The regulator's tables show the same logic at scale. In department stores, fashion and cosmetics carry some of the highest commissions, while imported luxury, the category with the most bargaining power, pays about what the food counters do. Across product groups, the rate tracks bargaining position.
This study reads the share of sales a food tenant pays as a price for traffic. It moves with the shape of the contract and, in public venues, with policy. We follow it through three hosts: the department-store food hall, which all three of Korea's largest department-store groups are rebuilding; the airport terminal, where Incheon Airport publishes its rules; and the highway service area, where the government decided in 2026 that the rate is too high. A university cafeteria tender shows a fourth kind of host, one that waives the rent altogether.
What the regulator's numbers show
Korea is unusual in publishing these rates at all. Each year the Fair Trade Commission surveys the commissions that large retailers collect from suppliers and tenants. Its December 2025 release, covering 2024 transactions, put the effective rate — what suppliers actually paid, as a share of their sales — at 19.1% for department stores, against 16.6% for hypermarkets, 12.6% for outlets and complex malls and 43.2% for duty-free shops. The contract rate written into agreements was higher: 24.9% in department stores and 16.7% in outlets and complex malls. The department-store effective rate barely moved from the year before, slipping by 0.02 percentage points.
Commission rates at Korea's three largest department-store groups and across formats, 2024 transactions, share of sales. The three groups are shown as a range, lowest to highest. Contract: the rate written into agreements, all transaction types. Sales-linked lease: rent set as a share of the tenant's sales. Effective: what suppliers and tenants actually paid. Source: Fair Trade Commission, 2025 survey of large retailers and its detailed tables.
Two things in the detailed tables matter for food. First, imported luxury, the category with the strongest hand, does not pay the most. Fashion and cosmetics sit near the top, at contract rates of 29.3% for women's formalwear and 29.1% for cosmetics; luxury pays 20.5%, about the same as food: ready-to-eat food, the group closest to a food hall's counters, sits at 20.3%, fresh food at 19.5% and processed food at 18.7%. Second, the spread between the three big groups is wider in food than in women's formalwear, cosmetics or luxury: ready-to-eat rates run from 17.8% to 22.1%.
Product group
All department stores
Three largest groups (range)
Women's formalwear
29.3%
29.3–30.1%
Cosmetics
29.1%
28.9–30.9%
Imported luxury
20.5%
20.2–22.0%
Ready-to-eat food
20.3%
17.8–22.1%
Fresh food
19.5%
16.8–21.9%
Processed food
18.7%
16.2–24.0%
Contract commission rates by product group in department stores, 2024 transactions, share of sales. Food sits with imported luxury, well below fashion and cosmetics, and varies more between stores. The three largest groups are shown as a range, lowest to highest. Source: Fair Trade Commission, 2025 survey of large retailers, detailed tables; rounded to one decimal.
What the host is buying
The averages pool every store and every supplier, from packaged-goods vendors to butchers, and do not single out the food hall. Underneath them the spread is wide: in department stores, 44% of sales-linked leases carry rates between 10% and 20%, and 41% between 20% and 30%. Press coverage of the 2026 food-hall rebuilds gives the stores' reason for wanting food: it brings visitors into the building, and the stores hope those visitors go on to buy fashion and luxury upstairs.
Food is also outgrowing the rest of the store. In the first half of 2026, food-and-beverage sales grew faster than total sales at each of the three big department-store groups: food rose by between 20% and 29%, total sales by between 15% and 24%. Newsis reported in July 2026 that retailers were competing to sign well-known bakery brands, one department store on exclusive terms, while malls staged bakery and dessert pop-ups to draw visitors.
Food is the part of the building that draws a crowd on its own. A host that needs that crowd elsewhere in the building has reason to charge food tenants less, and the most sought-after brands can ask for the least.
Three contract shapes: the percentage, the floor and the layer
Food tenants pay in one of three broad ways, and the shape matters as much as the headline rate. The simplest is the percentage: the tenant hands over a fixed share of sales, so the host shares the pain of a slow month. In department stores, about 85% of sales-linked leases carry rates between 10% and 30%.
The second shape adds a floor. The FTC records a mixed commission under which the store collects whichever is larger, a percentage of sales or a fixed sum. Across department stores the average mixed-contract rate was 15.5%, with a fixed component near ₩7.9m a month, below the 18.5% average on plain sales-linked leases: a lower percentage is the tenant's return for guaranteeing the floor. The leasing guide for Incheon Airport's commercial space uses the same device at larger scale, setting food-and-beverage rent as the higher of a minimum guarantee and sales times a rate, both bid by the operator.
Incheon Airport's food outlets are tendered in large lots. The 2023 food-and-beverage tender offered three lots of 33, 34 and 36 stores, scored bidders on proposal and price in an 80:20 ratio, and awarded terms running to 2028 with up to five years' extension. The weighting is the point: the airport is buying an operator's ability to fill a terminal with brands travellers want, not simply the highest rent.
The third shape is the layer, where an intermediary stands between the host and the brand. Etoday reported in 2022 that six operators held sublease contracts at Incheon and ran 80 of the airport's 210 food-and-beverage outlets. Highway service areas show what a middle layer can cost: government figures released in July 2026 showed rest-area tenants paying operating companies an average of 33% of their sales, and as much as 51%.
Highway service areas: share of sales paid to intermediaries
33% → 8–9%
Average paid by rest-area tenants to operating companies, against the level the government expects once a public management company contracts with tenants directly. The highest rate found was 51%. Source: government reform plan, as reported by Newsis and Financial News, July 2026.
Captive traffic is paid for at the till
Who pays a one-third commission? In the end, the traveller. A tenant can hand over a third of its sales only if captive traffic lets it charge prices the street would not bear. The reform plan put the average rest-area Americano at about ₩4,800 and set a goal of ₩2,000 or less once the middle layer is gone. A fee that size cannot come out of margin. In 2024, food and labour took 71.6% of a general restaurant's sales, up from 58.8% in 2015, and operating margin fell to 8.7% from 25.4%, according to the agriculture ministry's annual restaurant survey. A one-third commission on that cost base is payable only where prices rise to meet it.
Travellers waiting for a flight cannot walk out to a cheaper meal. That captivity lets a host charge commissions a street-front restaurant could never carry, and the traveller covers them at the till.
When the host waives the rent
Some hosts are not selling traffic at all. A Seoul university's request for proposals for a campus cafeteria, issued in August 2026, shows the model. Rent is waived outright, in the document's words to secure good-quality meals. The university supplies the room, basic building services and dining furniture; the operator carries food, labour and any further fit-out; the meal price is held at the campus's existing 5,500–6,000 won level; and the price section of the bid is to be filled in at zero rent. The host still exercises its bargaining power; it simply takes its return as a cheap meal rather than as a share of sales.
How big the market is, and why nobody counts it
No official statistic measures Korea's concession market, and the trade press says so. The figure most often repeated, ₩6tn, was still being cited in 2022 with no base year or source. NRG's research puts the market at roughly ₩6–12tn today (NRG estimate), at or above that figure because travel and leisure venues have refilled since. Any number depends on where the line is drawn — whether institutional catering counts, or restaurants that lease directly from a department store — and the range is wide because the definition is.
Broader foodservice data show where the growth sits. Figures published by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada put South Korea's consumer foodservice sales at US$78.9bn in 2024 and US$90.9bn in 2029. Standalone restaurants are most of that and grow slowest. Outlets inside retail, travel, leisure and lodging venues, the concession end of the market, account for 22.5% of sales in 2024 and a forecast 24.6% in 2029; travel locations grew 11.1% a year between 2020 and 2024 as airports refilled. Definitions move the total as much as the trend does: Mordor Intelligence, counting more widely, puts the market at US$138.1bn in 2025.
Location
2024
2029 forecast
CAGR 2024–29
Standalone restaurants
US$61.2bn
US$68.5bn
2.3%
Retail venues
US$8.9bn
US$10.6bn
3.6%
Travel venues
US$4.0bn
US$5.1bn
4.7%
Leisure venues
US$3.5bn
US$4.9bn
7.2%
Lodging
US$1.3bn
US$1.8bn
5.6%
Total
US$78.9bn
US$90.9bn
2.9%
The five-year outlook: where the rate goes by 2030
Department stores need their food halls more than they used to. Online channels took 59.0% of major retailers' sales in 2025, when offline sales grew 0.4% and department stores 4.3%, according to the trade ministry. Food is the traffic the stores are buying in response. One of the big three plans to spend tens of billions of won on a new food hall at a large Seoul store, the hall's first large-scale rebuild in about a decade, reopening in 2028 within a phased renovation of the whole store into the 2030s. A rival's Seoul store has built a gourmet space of several thousand pyeong that counted more than ten million purchasing customers in a single year.
Publicly owned venues are where the rate will move most. The rest-area reform removes the intermediary: a public management company, to be set up in early 2027, will contract tenants directly, chosen by an external committee on taste, service and price rather than the highest rent offered. The plan starts with eight rest areas and is meant to reach about 100 in 2027. If it holds, tenants' average rent falls to 8–9% of sales — a policy rate rather than a market one, and a picture of what a commission looks like once the host stops selling traffic.
Airports will add space before they cut rates. Incheon handled a record 74.07 million passengers in 2025 and expects growth of 2–6% in 2026, and its fourth-phase expansion lifted its annual passenger capacity to 106 million. More passengers mean more outlets to tender, and because rent is the higher of the bid floor and a share of sales, it rises with the crowd without a renegotiation.
Tenants have less room to give. With food and labour above 70% of a typical restaurant's sales, a tenant without pricing power cannot carry a higher share for long, while one that draws its own crowd can demand a lower one. The likely result by 2030 is a wider spread of rates inside the same food hall rather than a clear move in the average.
Path
What would have to be true
What it does to the rate
Food as the traffic engine
Department stores keep losing goods sales online and lean harder on food to bring visitors in.
Rates for the most sought-after brands fall further.
Policy reset
Direct, rate-capped contracts spread from rest areas to other publicly owned venues.
Intermediary layers thin out; rates converge toward single digits where the state is the host.
Floor-led growth
Airport traffic keeps rising and hosts lean on minimum guarantees that climb with passenger numbers.
Headline percentages hold, but more of the risk sits with tenants as the floors rise.
Three paths for food-and-beverage rents to 2030 — analytical constructs to frame the question, not forecasts. No valuation or price view is implied.
“The regulator's tables are a map of bargaining power, category by category.”
— Nathan Research Group, NRG Insights
The lesson travels beyond food. Wherever a host sells access to footfall — shopping centres, stadiums, online marketplaces — the fee a tenant pays tracks who brings the traffic. For the big three department stores, the food-hall rebuilds are a wager that food can still bring shoppers through the doors. For the tenants inside, the share of sales they hand over will be set by how much the building needs them.
How this article was built. Figures with a named source are public: the Fair Trade Commission's 2025 survey of large retailers and its detailed tables, Incheon Airport's leasing guide and tender reports, the government's rest-area reform plan, agriculture- and trade-ministry statistics, a published university tender document, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's market data and press reports. The one figure marked NRG estimate, the size of the concession market, comes from NRG's own research; it is rounded into a deliberately wide range and published only because public data point the same way. Companies are described rather than named. Where a retailer, tender or contract is described, the figures come from the regulator's tables, the tender document or the press report cited; figures for individual department-store groups are shown as ranges or rounded. The general descriptions of how hosts and tenants set rates are NRG's analysis. This is business and market research, not investment advice.
与 NRG 合作的方式
与 Nathan Research Group 合作。
The Fair Trade Commission publishes average rates and airports publish their tender rules, but neither shows how a rate is negotiated, or what a minimum guarantee costs a tenant in a slow year. That knowledge sits with the people on both sides of these contracts. Reaching them, compliantly, is what we do.
韩国首家专家网络 — 首尔，2013年至今
我们会请谁到场
Retail-property and shopping-centre advisers
Percentage-rent, minimum-guarantee and fit-out terms across department stores, malls and outlets.
Travel-retail concession advisers
How terminal concessions are packaged, and how traffic-indexed rents behave over a contract.
F&B brand finance teams
Store-level sales, pricing and lease-cost planning for multi-site food brands.
Transport and public-procurement policy analysts
Public tender rules and the published 2026 rest-area reform plan.
Distribution-law and fair-trade counsel
The Large-Scale Retail Business Act, commission disclosure and what a host may charge.
South Korea consumer foodservice sales by location. Venue-based locations grow faster than standalone restaurants. Source: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Sector Trend Analysis – Foodservice in South Korea (2025), which cites third-party market data; values rounded.
Foodservice market analysts
Market sizing across travel, leisure and retail venues, and the definitions behind it.
项目怎么推进
1范围界定
把您要研究的行业问题，转成具体的专家画像和问题清单，对准您需要作出的决定。
2寻访与核实
每一位专家在访谈前都要过一遍：课题相关性、经验的时效性，以及有没有利益冲突。
3组织与归纳
按您的时间安排访谈；需要的话，另附一份按问题逐条对应的书面归纳。
如果您的团队正在评估 Korean food-hall leasing、the concession market，乃至范围更大的 Korean retail-property and foodservice market，请告诉我们您眼下要做的是什么决定。
