Korean Convenience Store Goods Bread: Pokémon to Minumsa

Three o’clock on a weekday afternoon at a GS25 in Seoul. A man in a suit scans the bread shelf and walks out empty-handed. Five minutes later two university students come in, look at the same shelf, and one of them pulls out a phone to refresh an app. “Not here either.” What they are after is not the bread. It is the bookmark sealed inside the bag.

Scenes like this are completely normal in Korean convenience stores. Buy a bread and a mystery collectible comes with it; people visit several stores to complete a set, check stock on apps and trade duplicates on secondhand platforms. This guide explains where Korea’s “goods bread” culture came from, what is selling in autumn 2026, and how you can get your hands on one as a visitor. If you want the basics on the different chains first, start with our guide to Korean convenience store brands.

What is "goods bread" at Korean convenience stores?

It is convenience-store bread with one random collectible in each bag. Because you never know what you will get, landing the one you want usually means buying several — so the bread effectively becomes the price of a lucky draw. Think of Japan’s Bikkuriman chocolate stickers or shokugan snack toys; in Korea the format settled into packaged convenience-store bread.

The freebie has its own vocabulary:

• ttibussil — short for “a sticker you peel off and stick on.” Pokémon bread coined it, and it now means any sticker inside a bread bag.
• poka — short for photocard, from idol fandom culture: a card printed with a member’s photo.
• Bookmarks — the new genre introduced by 2026’s Minumsa bread: clear bookmarks printed with novel covers and famous lines.

How did goods bread start? The Pokémon bread story

The original Pokémon bread dates back to 1998, and its 2022 relaunch created today’s craze. At its late-1990s peak it sold about 5 million a month. Stories of kids keeping the sticker and skipping the bread became something like a school-playground legend of that generation.

In February 2022, SPC Samlip brought back “Pokémon bread is back” after 16 years — and those schoolkids came back too, now office workers in their thirties. Seven kinds of bread came with 159 different stickers at random (the 151 first-generation Pokémon plus 8 popular poses).

📈 Pokémon bread sales milestones (media reports based on SPC Samlip figures)

What Pokémon bread proved was simple: people do not queue because the bread is great; they queue because the freebie is worth collecting. Since then, Korean convenience stores have applied the formula to almost every popular IP they can license.

Which goods breads are selling in autumn 2026?

GS25’s Minumsa bread, with bookmarks, and CU’s RESCENE bread, with photocards, were the two pillars. One is about books, the other about an idol group — and the people buying them could hardly have been more different.

Minumsa bread — turning books into collectibles

GS25 launched it on 21 August with publisher Minumsa and the character brand “Oneului Gwiyeoum” (Today’s Cuteness). The first two were named On Love (mocha bun, custard) and I Wanted to Cry Fresh Like a Wolf (sesame chewy bread, salted milk); on 26 August came Pride and Prejudice (mocha bun, milk cream) and A Bad Boy Is Standing (sesame chewy bread, custard). Even the bread names are book titles.

Inside each bag is one of 20 clear bookmarks: 15 based on world literature (Pride and Prejudice, Hamlet and others) and 5 on Korean poetry collections.

📚 Minumsa bread sales (media reports based on GS25 figures)

Demand far outran supply. Minumsa said daily orders topped 50,000, three to four times what the factory could normally make, and some stores received only about three a day. Then GS25 ended sales with a final order on 7 October, a move widely read as protecting the scarcity of a limited edition before interest cooled. No relaunch has been decided.

What makes this one especially interesting is who bought it: book-loving women in their twenties and thirties. In early September, 26% of buyers were women in their twenties and 25% women in their thirties. Koreans call the trend of showing off reading and book taste almost like fashion text-hip (text + hip), and Minumsa bread is that trend landing on a convenience-store shelf.

RESCENE bread — the idol bread men in their thirties swept up

CU teamed up with its brand model, the girl group RESCENE, for five breads named after members. Starting with “Woni’s Corn Cream Bread” on 17 September, it rolled out “Zena’s Strawberry Jam Sandwich,” “May’s Cinnamon Roll,” “Minami’s Melon Bread” and “Liv’s Chocolate Hotteok,” each bag holding one of 27 clear member photocards.

About 99% of the first bread’s launch-day supply of roughly 30,000 sold within 24 hours; 100,000 sold in four days, and the five kinds reached about 600,000 combined by 1 October. Over the same period, CU’s total bread sales rose 20% year on year.

What else is on convenience-store shelves

• 7-Eleven League of Legends photocards (limited release on 23 September) — not bread, but the same formula: packs of five random cards out of about 300, designed so up to four people can play a game with the cards alone. Since starting with K League cards in 2023, 7-Eleven has sold more than 17 million packs of sports cards, including the EPL and KBO.
• GS25 × Taegeukdang (from 13 October) — three breads (butter cream bread, oranda bread, mini mammoth bread) with Taegeukdang, a Seoul bakery that opened in 1946. Instead of collectibles, this one sells retro.
• GS25 × Hanjeongseon chapssaltteok — the fruit rice cake people queue for in Seongsu, reworked as a frozen dessert. No collectible, but the same convenience-store open-run. Details in our Hanjeongseon guide.

Why do Koreans buy the bread for the freebie?

Because it is the cheapest collecting game you can play for a few thousand won. Here are the reasons industry insiders and Korean media point to.

1. It is cheap — ₩2,000–3,000 a bag, far less than a figure or official merch, so “one more” is easy. CU itself credits the reasonable price for lowering the barrier.
2. You never know what you get — it is random, so you keep buying until the one you want shows up. Same principle as gacha.
3. It proves what you love — Koreans call the habit of digging deep into a favorite and collecting everything around it digging consumption. A bookmark or photocard is a tiny badge of that taste.
4. The hunt is the fun — the “app open-run” was born: check stock on the app around delivery time, then dash over. Right after Minumsa bread launched, GS25’s app Woori Dongne GS logged 399,988 new installs in August, its highest month of the year, with 65.3% of new users in their twenties and thirties.
5. A secondary market attaches itself — buy the one you’re missing, sell the duplicate. The industry sees active resale as a “lock-in effect” that keeps people coming back to the store.

Resale prices are no joke. Korean media reported Minumsa bookmarks trading at ₩5,000 to over ₩10,000 depending on the design, with some limited ones at ₩20,000–30,000, and rare RESCENE photocards going for six to eight times the bread’s price. For how Korea’s secondhand app works, see our Danggeun guide for foreigners.

Can travelers buy Korean goods bread?

Yes — just treat the hunt as part of the experience. Popular goods breads often arrive only a few at a time per store, so an empty shelf does not always mean they are sold out.

🔎 Checking goods bread stock by chain (as of October 2026)

What you can still buy (mid-October 2026) and what is over

🗓️ Status as of mid-October 2026

How long will the goods bread craze last?

Honestly, each product lives fast and the formula lives long. Of the many character breads that followed Pokémon bread, few exploded the same way; 2024’s Dragon Ball bread was judged not to match Pokémon bread’s reaction. Minumsa bread even ended itself after two months.

The numbers, though, say the formula is alive and well. CU’s collaboration bakery sales grew 43.3% in 2024, 36.6% in 2025 and 30.9% in January–August 2026, consistently beating the 14.8% growth of CU’s overall private-label bakery line. Nobody knows what the next goods bread will be, but it is a safe bet that someone, somewhere in Korea, is refreshing a convenience-store app right now. For why Korean dessert fads spin so fast, read our Korean dessert trend timeline, and for the words young Koreans use, see Korean MZ slang 2026.

If you pop into a convenience store on your trip, take a closer look at the bread shelf. If a bag says something like “랜덤 ○○ 1종” (one random ○○), you have found the cheapest way to join a Korean trend.