Direct linkage between raw material origins and factories

Production hubs for health functional foods are moving in a direction that changes raw material procurement structures together with, rather than simply adding, new factories. Starting this year through 2030, Korea Red Ginseng Corp. will invest KRW 13 billion to build a manufacturing facility in Yeongju, while promoting a system that gives priority to ginseng produced in cultivation areas under the jurisdiction of the Punggi Ginseng Agricultural Cooperative.

This trend aligns with the need to secure a stable local supply of natural raw materials that have high import dependence or large quality variations. As methods that connect cultivation stages directly with corporate demand spread—such as discussions over licorice in Geumsan and large-scale contract cultivation of Japanese hop in Jangheung—strategies aimed at simultaneously locking in sales channels for farmers and supply chains for companies are becoming increasingly clear.

Transfer of research assets to the field

The way regional industries are being fostered is also shifting toward moving research results out of papers and into corporate products. The Jecheon Oriental Medicine and Natural Products Industry Promotion Foundation joined hands with the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology's National Natural Products Bank to connect material discovery, efficacy verification, and corporate support, while the Rural Development Administration also directly linked technology transfer and commercialization consulting for citrus and medicinal crops through the Agri-Food Themed Technology Partnering program.

Behind these changes is the reality that small and medium-sized enterprises find it difficult to establish their own testing and analysis equipment and standardization systems. As a result, shared infrastructure such as open laboratories and quality evaluation standards such as the udesmol quantitative analysis method have become more important, and the core of industrialization is shifting from the discovery of materials itself to verification and reproducibility.

Integration of data and talent into industry

The competitiveness of the natural products industry is no longer explained by production facilities alone; it is changing into a structure that also includes the ability to utilize data. The Rural Development Administration's agri-bio specialized large language model (LLM), the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine Promotion's advancement of the Korean Medicine Laboratory Information Management System (KLIMS), and Jecheon City's corporate support initiative in cooperation with the Korea Bioinformation Center (KOBIC) are all attempts to make scattered research information immediately usable for product development.

At the same time, universities and local support institutions are aligning workforce development in advance as well. The 2026 HIT-Bio Networking Day and Corporate Briefing hosted by Semyung University and Chungbuk Technopark serves as a mechanism for matching education and employment to the needs of local companies, showing that regional clusters are moving beyond a facility-centered model toward a stage that ties together data and talent.

Expansion and control proceeding simultaneously

Even as expectations for industrial expansion grow, the market's weak points are also becoming visible. News that Frombio is pursuing the sale of management control shows that health functional food companies may find it difficult to survive through scale expansion alone, while a case in which 12 hazardous products were sold through a major domestic online shopping mall and controversy over large-scale advance preparation at external herbal decoction facilities exposed gaps in managing the boundaries between distribution and manufacturing.

Nevertheless, companies continue entering the natural products and health functional foods sector because it can generate revenue faster than new drugs and because consumer demand is also broadening. Bio companies are growing health functional food businesses as a new source of revenue, and with the stomach health-related health functional food market growing from KRW 9.2 billion to KRW 60.8 billion, quality control and regulatory consistency are likely to become variables that determine market trust going forward, no less than supply chain restructuring and support for industrialization.