Spend a few months watching Korean cafés, convenience stores, and social media and one thing becomes impossible to miss: dessert trends here move at a pace that feels almost absurd. The tanghulu shops that lined every street in 2023 have nearly vanished two years later. The Dubai chocolate that emptied convenience-store shelves in the summer of 2024 cooled off before the year was out. This article traces every major Korean dessert craze from the pandemic-era dalgona coffee of 2020 to the ube wave of 2026 — and explains why these cycles keep getting shorter, and what you should actually seek out if you are in Seoul right now.
At a glance
- The big arc: dalgona coffee & croffle (2020) → bagels & yakgwa ticketing (2021) → salt bread, yakgwa, Pokémon bread (2022) → tanghulu (2023) → Dubai chocolate, Yoajung, chestnut tiramisu (2024) → matcha & ddu-zzun-ku (2025) → butter tteok & ube (2026).
- Trend half-lives keep shrinking. The croffle lasted well over a year; tanghulu ran about 10 months; Dubai chocolate cooled in roughly four.
- Two forces define the 2020s K-dessert landscape: the MZ generation's reinterpretation of traditional sweets (yakgwa, Gaeseong juak), and the rise of hybrids that fuse two viral hits into one.
Why do Korean dessert trends burn out so fast?
The core story is a shrinking half-life. In 2014, Honey Butter Chip dominated the snack world for years. Dalgona coffee in 2020 rode the entire pandemic. Since then, the turnover has accelerated sharply. According to consumer-data analyses cited by Korean media, the croffle’s popularity half-life was roughly 175 days. Tanghulu clocked in at about 56 days. Yoajung managed around 49 days. Dubai chocolate? Barely two weeks.
Three forces are at work. First, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts spread a trend at lightning speed — and make it feel stale just as quickly. Second, convenience stores and franchise chains replicate any buzzy item within days and flood the market, erasing scarcity overnight. Third, Korean consumers have developed a sharp appetite for “the next thing before anyone else knows about it.” The result: dessert trends now run on a monthly clock, not a yearly one.
2020–2021: Staying home, going viral — the first wave
Locked down and bored, Koreans turned their kitchens into cafés. Dalgona coffee — instant coffee, sugar, and water whipped hundreds of times and spooned over milk — began when actor Jung Il-woo mentioned a Macau café drink on a Korean variety show. In 2020, TikTok carried it worldwide; #dalgonacoffeechallenge racked up tens of millions of views. Around the same time, the croffle — croissant dough pressed in a waffle iron — rode a home-waffle-maker boom and became a permanent café staple.
In 2021, Netflix’s Squid Game turned dalgona (ppopgi) into a global meme. The scene where players carve a shape out of sugar candy with a needle launched a worldwide challenge, transforming a half-forgotten street snack into a tourist bucket-list item. That September, London Bagel Museum opened its doors on a quiet lane in Anguk, Jongno-gu, and practically coined the term “open run” — the practice of lining up before a shop even opens. By year’s end, yakgwa ticketing (a portmanteau of yakgwa, the traditional honey-glazed pastry, and ticketing, the frantic online scramble for concert seats) had entered the lexicon: traditional Korean sweets were being rediscovered by twenty-somethings as cool.
2022: Halmaenial — when grandma flavours got hip
The keyword for 2022 was halmaenial — a fusion of halmae (grandma) and millennial. Ingredients your grandmother would recognise — black sesame, injeolmi (soybean-rice cake), mugwort, red bean — were reframed by the MZ generation as “wholesome, never-get-bored flavours.” At the centre of it all was yakgwa: crisp on the outside, syrup-soaked and chewy within, it triggered open runs and sellouts. Yakgwa cookies, yakgwa financiers, and Gaeseong juak (a Joseon-era fried rice-cake sweet) followed in a cascade of spin-offs.
That same year, as Japan travel reopened, butter-scented salt bread (sio-ppang) spread nationwide. Pokémon bread — ordinary pastries with character stickers inside — caused convenience-store stampedes. And the fresh-cream doughnut wave, led by Knotted and Old Ferry Donut, hit its peak.
2023: The year of tanghulu — rise, National Assembly, collapse
If one dessert owned 2023, it was tanghulu: fruit skewers lacquered in a hard sugar shell, a Chinese street snack that went thermonuclear in Korea. The ASMR crack of teeth through the candy coating made it catnip for YouTubers and TikTokers. Card-spending data shows sales surging from April 2023 and peaking that September, with revenue multiplying roughly fivefold in six months. The largest chain, Wangga Tanghulu, rocketed from 11 outlets in 2021 to 43 in 2022, then to roughly 532 by late 2023. Among elementary-school kids, the maratanghulu ritual — a bowl of numbing mala xiang guo followed by a sweet tanghulu chaser — became a challenge in its own right.
Then the backlash hit. Concerns over excessive sugar, childhood diabetes, obesity, and tooth decay grew loud enough that in September 2023 the National Assembly summoned the CEO of Wangga Tanghulu’s parent company as a witness for its October parliamentary audit. From October onward, both sales and foot traffic slid, and closures snowballed. Wangga Tanghulu’s annual revenue collapsed from roughly ₩25.6 billion to about ₩2 billion the following year — a drop of more than 90%. By 2026, roughly 20 stores remained. A craze that dominated a nation was dead in half a year: the textbook case of Korean dessert boom-and-bust.
2024: Dubai chocolate, Yoajung, and chestnut tiramisu
The summer of 2024 belonged to Dubai chocolate. The original came from FIX, a small Dubai brand, and consisted of kataifi (shredded phyllo pastry) and pistachio cream encased in chocolate. A Dubai influencer’s tasting video racked up tens of millions of TikTok views in December 2023, sparking a global ripple. In Korea, DIY imitation videos went viral in the first half of 2024, causing a nationwide kataifi shortage. On 6 July 2024, convenience-store chain CU dropped the first mass-market Dubai-style chocolate bar; GS25 and 7-Eleven followed within days. The trend peaked in the second week of July, then cooled almost as fast.
That same summer, the gap tanghulu left behind was filled by Yoajung — short for “yogurt ice cream, done right.” The build-your-own format, where you pick toppings on a base of tart frozen yogurt, caught fire among women in their twenties and thirties. Store count jumped from 166 (2023) to over 350 (2024), and in July 2024 Samhwa Foods acquired a stake in the operating company for roughly ₩40 billion. A price controversy soon followed — a loaded cup could easily top ₩15,000–20,000 — and footballer Son Heung-min made headlines by remarking that Yoajung was expensive. DIY-at-home versions promptly went viral.
In autumn 2024, Netflix’s cooking competition Culinary Class Wars turned chef Napoli Matfia into a sensation, and his chestnut tiramisu became the season’s runaway hit. When CU released a “chestnut tiramisu cup” at ₩4,900 in October 2024, it sold out instantly. The wave then broadened into chestnut yanggaeng (sweet jelly), chestnut Mont Blanc, chestnut tarts — a whole “young-chestnut” dessert category built on a single seasonal ingredient.
2025: The matcha panic and the birth of ‘ddu-zzun-ku’
Two forces drove 2025: matcha and the Dubai chewy cookie. Demand for matcha lattes and matcha ice cream exploded on TikTok and Instagram, while supply tightened — Japan, the main source, had been hit by scorching summers that shrank harvests. What followed was a global matcha shortage that Koreans dubbed the “matcha crisis.” Stories circulated of people waiting overnight to buy a single tin, and resellers flipped matcha at a premium. Matcha, however, did something most Korean dessert fads do not: it stuck around. By 2026 it had settled into the permanent menu at most cafés.
Where Dubai chocolate faded, its heir appeared: the Dubai chewy cookie, instantly shortened in Korean to ddu-zzun-ku (dubai + jjoldeuk, chewy). The formula took Dubai chocolate’s kataifi-pistachio core and fused it with a chewy marshmallow-glutinous-rice texture — a distinctly Korean adaptation. The name first surfaced in spring 2025 and exploded on social media by the second half of the year. In December 2025, convenience stores launched their own versions, triggering sellouts; by January 2026, franchise giants like Paris Baguette and Sulbing had joined in. The frenzy brought side effects: ingredient shortages, price spikes (₩5,000 per cookie, some exceeding ₩10,000), and a surge in food-safety complaints.
2026 right now: Butter tteok, ube, and what’s rising
The first-half 2026 social-media meme list includes ddu-zzun-ku, butter tteok, Chang-eok tteok, ube, and yellow cheese chips. Among them, Shanghai-style butter tteok — a chewy rice cake slab topped with a pat of butter, homemade and intensely photogenic — caught fire in the spring. But the real headline is ube, the Filipino purple yam. Touted as “the next matcha,” ube is spreading through cafés and bakeries: Hawaii Kim’s ube pancakes in Hongdae, purple lattes at department-store cafés, and features naming it the “flavor of the year.” Franchises are piling in, too: in summer 2026, TWOSOME Place launched a spoonable “Crunch Abak” dessert, part of a broader race for Gen Z experience-driven sweets.
The timeline at a glance
| Period | Signature Trend | Vibe | Approximate Run |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Dalgona coffee, croffle | Home café, lockdown | Throughout the pandemic |
| 2021 | Squid Game dalgona, bagels, yakgwa ticketing | Hallyu, open runs | — |
| 2022 | Salt bread, yakgwa, Pokémon bread | Halmaenial, tradition returns | Salt bread ~2 years |
| 2023 | Tanghulu, maratanghulu | ASMR, meteoric rise & crash | ~10 months |
| 2024 | Dubai chocolate, Yoajung, chestnut tiramisu | Convenience-store & TV-show driven | Dubai chocolate ~4 months |
| 2025 | Matcha, ddu-zzun-ku | Shortages, hybrids | Matcha became a staple |
| 2026 | Butter tteok, ube | Monthly turnover | Still unfolding |
So what should you actually eat in Korea right now (2026)?
Trends move fast, but if you are visiting from abroad, the smart play is to mix the current buzz with the year-round staples.
For what’s hot right now, scan convenience-store new-arrival shelves for ddu-zzun-ku and look for ube items at cafés. Convenience stores — GS25, CU, 7-Eleven — are the fastest mirrors of whatever Korea is obsessed with this month, so a quick sweep of the snack aisle every few days is its own kind of trend tourism.
For year-round classics, start here. Traditional K-desserts like yakgwa (that crisp-outside, syrup-soaked-inside texture) and Gaeseong juak win over foreigners with their restrained sweetness and photogenic look — Samlip yakgwa is even exported to Costco in the US. Bagels and salt bread cluster around Anguk and Ikseon-dong and are easy to stumble upon. Yoajung gives you the satisfaction of building your own yogurt ice cream cup (just watch the toppings if you are watching your won).
Street snacks are seasonal. In winter, the holy trinity is bungeoppang (fish-shaped red-bean pastry), hotteok (griddled brown-sugar pancakes), and gyeranppang (egg bread). Year-round, the Myeongdong and Namdaemun stalls serve tornado potatoes — spiral-cut potato skewers — and Korean-style corn dogs coated in mozzarella and potato dice.
A few spots worth saving before you go:
📍 Open in Naver Map — London Bagel Museum Anguk (bagels, open-run mecca) 📍 Open in Naver Map — Jayeondo Salt Bread Ikseon (salt bread) 📍 Open in Naver Map — Hawaii Kim Hongdae (ube desserts)
Frequently asked questions
Q. Can you still buy tanghulu in Korea? Yes, it has not vanished entirely. But Wangga Tanghulu, which ran over 500 stores at its 2023 peak, was down to roughly 20 locations by 2026 — mostly in tourist districts and cram-school neighbourhoods.
Q. What exactly is ‘ddu-zzun-ku’? It is the Korean abbreviation of “Dubai chewy cookie.” The formula takes 2024’s viral Dubai chocolate — kataifi pastry and pistachio cream — and adds a chewy layer of marshmallow and glutinous-rice texture. Korea was the first market to evolve the Dubai-chocolate concept into this specific chewy-cookie format.
Q. Why do Korean dessert trends change so fast? Three accelerators: the rapid spread-and-burn cycle of TikTok and Instagram, convenience stores and franchises that clone any hit within days, and a consumer mindset that prizes “the next thing nobody knows yet” over “what everyone already has.” Trend cycles have compressed from years to months.
Sources
- Tanghulu trend and sales data: Kyunghyang Shinmun — Tanghulu sales trajectory
- Wangga Tanghulu store count and revenue: News1, Namuwiki — Dalkom Wangga Tanghulu
- Tanghulu National Assembly audit witness summons: Newsis
- Maratanghulu: Namuwiki — Maratanghulu
- Dubai chocolate trend and convenience-store launch: Hankyung, Seoul Shinmun
- Dubai chocolate decline: Daum / Hankyoreh — Where did all the Dubai chocolate go?
- Dubai chewy cookie (ddu-zzun-ku): Namuwiki — Dubai Chewy Cookie, ZDNet
- Yoajung: Edaily Market In, Hankyung — Yoajung pricing
- Chestnut tiramisu and Culinary Class Wars: Newsis, Kyunghyang Shinmun
- Matcha shortage: Daum / Munhwa Ilbo
- Ube as “the next matcha”: Maeil Ilbo, Global Economic
- Yakgwa and yakgwa ticketing: Etoday Issue Cracker, Sungkyunkwan University Press — Yakketing
- Salt bread, croffle, halmaenial: Asia Economy — Salt Bread, Namuwiki — Croffle
- London Bagel Museum: Namuwiki
- Dalgona coffee (2020): Forbes
- Squid Game and dalgona: Good Morning America
- Tanghulu global coverage (Jennie et al.): SCMP, Korea Times
- Trend half-life and ultra-short cycles: Etoday — From Yakgwa to Butter Tteok, POSTECH Times
- Yakgwa export (Samlip, US Costco): Financial Content
- Street snacks (bungeoppang, hotteok, tornado potato): Korea Times — Seoul winter street food, VISITKOREA — Tornado Potato
- TWOSOME Crunch Abak: Etnews