How it begins.
2 years ago, my boss came here alone from Korea. He knew the landlord of this building and the store was selling Taiwanese food at the time. Business was not good. My boss decided that he wanted to make some Korean food in Kingston. He did not have a lot of capital to start with. Only $10,000. And so, KAS started out only selling a small variety of selections. One of the challenges to starting a grocery store business was that we didn’t know what’s the best Taiwanese, Chinese or Japanese food people here would like to eat and buy. We first contacted a lot of wholesalers and gradually expand our food business. Today, we are partnering with 10 different wholesalers. All of our product are imported.
Any future plans?
We plan to move to the upper floor of this building as we are currently in the basement.
What do you think makes you popular in Kingston?
We offer a huge variety of products. From frozen foods like dumplings and fishballs to instant noodles, asian snacks and sauces. We also offer various ways to pay like weChat and Alipay in addition to the usual cash, credit or debit. I think this helps us be more appealing to Chinese customers who are more used to paying by these methods.
Also, if you head to our website, http://www.kingstonasiansuper.com/, you can order anything from KAS to be delivered to you. I believe having this convenient feature helps attract more customers. In addition to our great products and friendly staff, we often get asked questions about how to cook certain authentic Korean dishes with the sauces and ingredients we sell. Thus, we took the initiative to provide printed recipes of a few of our favourite Korean dishes in-store. Please check them out and ask the cashier if you don’t know where these recipes are.
What do most people buy in your store?
Based on my observations, 70% of our customers are Chinese. In the winter season, they tend to buy hotpot ingredients, sauces and soup bases. Dumplings and buns are also local favourites! Snacks are popular among some customers too.
For Caucasian customers, they love to buy sushi ingredients and instant noodles. They do not really know what hotpot is so I would recommend them a few ingredients they would may like to try for hotpot.
Any special deals or discounts KAS does?
Yes, we do offer a 5% off for students who are in our associated clubs. The clubs are: QFA, QHKSA, GPS, QKSA, QCSSA, JRQ and AKCSE. And for restaurants that we have close relationships with like Podonamu or Sub-sushi, we would give them 10% off.
Do you notice any difference in culture between the customers here and typical customers in Korea?
Yes, the most obvious difference is that Koreans love spicy food while people here cannot really eat spicy food. That is definitely something we consider when deciding what kinds of food we should sell here at KAS. Also, Koreans typically have no allergies. We can consume nuts, fish, gluten, etc. while in Kingston, I noticed that people are constantly checking the ingredients label, something that I found strange at first. Now I realized it is because of allergies and so this observation also becomes important when we are deciding the types of food we should sell.
Which of the food here is FAVOURITE?
It’s difficult to choose, but it would have to be these 2 ramen: the BulDak Carbonara flavour and Shin Ramen Black.
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