INTERVIEW Community women gather to revive traditional food

Kim Keum-soon, 69, CEO of Allmeone, poses with traditional Korean sweets known as "hangwa" at the shop in Dangjin, South Chungcheong Province. / Korea Times photo by Kim Ji-soo

By Kim Ji-soo

Dangjin, SOUTH CHUNGCHEONG PROVINCE — It is lunchtime at the Baekseok Allmeone Farming Association Cooperation in the Maesil-ro neighborhood. On Thursday, the women at the co-op, in their white uniforms complete with caps, gather for their lunch break. They engage in amicable conversation as they eat rice cake soup.

To the residents of the neighborhood formerly known as Baekseok Village, these women, whose median age is about 75 and the oldest is 83, are workers and members of the co-op that makes “hangwa,” a traditional Korean dessert of fried rice coated with plum-flavored rice grain syrup, as well as other food products.

Some advantages of the co-op are its access to locally grown ingredients, including plums and rice, for the traditional Korean desserts the members make, and its ideal location for providing field experiences for visitors.

The Baekseok cooperation is part of a gradually expanding area of agriculture — known as the sixth industrialization — that grows ingredients, processes products and offers field experiences and other tourist services to revive the declining agricultural industry.

The flat, peaceful Maesil-ro neighborhood is inland. Its plums were harvested too late to compete nationally for sales with those harvested earlier in the south. The residents make hangwa by processing the plums into extracts mixed with rice grain syrup.

The co-op started in 2012 with 33 women, each of whom contributed capital of 2 million won. It has since grown to 58 members. Initial sales in 2012 were around 90 million won. This figure reached about 75 million won in 2017. “We are looking to reach another level soon by hitting 1 billion won (in sales),” said Kim Keum-soon, 69, CEO of Allmeone.

As the Lunar New Year holiday approaches, the women at Allmeone are busy. Its biggest achievement is its empowerment of older residents in the community, especially women who get a chance to enter the workforce at a later age. Since 2013, the government has been promoting this area of the agricultural industry as part of efforts to raise the quality of life and create jobs in rural communities, where people face pressure as free trade pacts are signed and the population ages. According to 2015 figures released by Statistics Korea, people who are 65 or older make up 38.4 percent of the population in agricultural communities.

The women of the cooperation weren’t always so busy. They started selling its products in 2012 for Chuseok, a major Korean autumn holiday, reaching about 90 million won in sales.

Encouraged by this success, the women increased the scale and elected Kim as their chief. Kim, a former Seoul resident, got down to work. With a little help of her husband, who used to work for a conglomerate in Seoul, the co-op has made it to where it is now.

“We went through a lot of trial and error,” Kim said. “I think, all in all, it took about three years for Allmeone to become as functional as we are now.” The co-op’s cash cow is hangwa, but the members also make salted sliced plums and plum-flavored red chili pepper paste, products sold at the shop and online.

There are myriad of agricultural cooperatives around the nation, but Allmeone stands out because of its all-elderly women members and the many awards it has won.

It was selected as one of eight outstanding village companies by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, and it also it won the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs?top prize for farming cooperations engaged in the sixth industrialization of agriculture.

“We make our hangwa with sticky rice grown from a single-source field, and the plums and sesame seeds are also grown here,” Kim said.

Kim makes a practice of purchasing the produce at a standardized price every year, that is, at a higher price than distributors pay for them. “We try to give back to the farmers more rather than seek more profit through our co-op products,” she said.

Kim has been working to standardize the taste and safety of the co-op’s products to help it earn Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) accreditation, a government system through which food safety is addressed.

At the co-op site, Kim welcomes the customers who pop in to purchase products, takes customer orders by cellphone and goes back and forth between her employees to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Kim, a former housewife who had brief working experience before getting married, said she is belatedly discovering her “business” side.

Kwon Tak, 73, is one of the 20 or so women gathered for lunch on Thursday, as they have been working to fill orders for the Lunar New Year holiday starting Feb. 15. She has been with the co-op since the beginning. Before joining, she worked on her farm.

“It feels good to be able to earn a wage, be able to buy my grandson his junior high school uniform and send my mother a 100,000 won allowance. It feels good,” Kwon said.

After the co-op hits its goal of 1 billion won in annual sales, it hopes to create a residential community for senior citizens who live alone, Kim said. “We hope to build that so people do not have to go to nursing homes or suffer depression from living alone,” she said.

“But in the meantime, we need to come up with new products to be able to achieve that target, and that remains the challenge for now but something we hope to overcome by making traditional Korean sauces.”