It started with foot massages.

Alex Shandrovsky, Managing Director of FoodTech Weekly, and I have hosted FoodTech Weekly gatherings together in Seoul and in Singapore. After every one of them we ended up in the same conversation. The founders and investors who fly in for a week do far better when someone local tells them who to meet, which week to come and what to skip. Every country, we kept saying, should have that person.

On Alex's last visit to Seoul we finished the day on two massage beds. Somewhere between the foot massage and the thumbs-up photo, "someone should write it down" became "you should write it down". Alex announced it on LinkedIn under the heading "food messages in Seoul". He meant foot massages. The thumbs-up photo is the evidence.

So this is that guide. Korea is one of the most active food-tech markets in Asia, and almost none of it is documented in English: the regulatory routes sit in Korean-language notices, the corporate programmes run in Korean, and the two biggest trade shows have nearly identical English names. Visitors arrive with a hotel booking and a list of logos, and leave without the meetings that mattered. This site closes that gap: who to meet, when to come, how approvals work and how to get around, checked against primary sources and dated.