NahmNahmWhen we think about the food on our plates, it’s easy to assume it simply shows up—grown somewhere, trucked in overnight, ready to order. Especially in countries like South Korea, where convenience culture has been perfected, you don’t have to walk far before spotting a fast-food restaurant or a 24-hour mart stocked with global brands and seasonal bounty, no matter the time of the day or the month of the year.
Beneath this disproportionately sheer abundance, a quieter crisis is brewing.
In rural South Korea, the average farmer is nearing 70. Small towns that were once the backbone of the nation’s food supply are shrinking. Fields are going fallow. Younger generations are moving away, and with them, so too are the stories, skills, and livelihoods that kept Korea fed.
The government has plans, but like anywhere else on the planet, policy moves slowly. Meanwhile, some visible champions of local agriculture today aren’t ministries or think tanks but fast-food chains and convenience stores.
Welcome to the era of “loconomy”.
The problem
McDonald’s is a company that prides itself on global sameness: identical menus, convenience, consistency, and zero surprises. But in South Korea, the brand faced an unusual perception problem.
“Over 50% of our ingredients were sourced locally,” said Haeyeon Lee, chief marketing officer of McDonald’s Korea. “But consumers still viewed McDonald’s as a foreign fast-food chain with little connection to Korea.”
“That was a big challenge and also a missed opportunity. Especially now, when consumers are increasingly making purchasing decisions based on values like sustainability and community support, it was important for us to close that perception gap and show our commitment to Korea’s local economy and producers.”
With the rise of conscious food movements like farm-to-table, that kind of gap can be costly to both reputation and relevance. A May 2024 report by the Korea Rural Economic Institute found Korean consumers were increasingly drawn to brands that embraced sustainability, regional coexistence, and transparent sourcing.
McDonald’s needed a reset. Not a seasonal gimmick, but a systemic rethink of how it connected to Korea’s food culture. In 2021, these insights gave birth to the Taste of Korea platform and, via it, the Loconomy Burger, featuring green onions from Jindo, garlic from Changnyeong, and tea pork from Boseong. The platform became a storytelling tool to spotlight farmers, regions, and the local produce that was the star ingredient of each menu item.
As of April 2025, McDonald’s has sold 24 million Taste of Korea menu items, sourcing over 800 tonnes of regional produce and reinvesting cultural cachet into Korea’s ailing agricultural economy.
From brief to boots in the mud
Lee said the team set out to launch a “signature burger, signature menu” made entirely from locally produced ingredients, built on the insight that Koreans prefer local produce—even showing a willingness to pay more for it.
Creative partner Leo Burnett Korea quickly realised conventional approaches wouldn’t cut it.
“We initially approached it like any other launch—with slick visuals, catchy copy, fast timelines,” said Hyeah Nahm, executive creative director at Leo Korea. “But it felt hollow. These stories weren’t about us. They were about the people growing the food.”
So Nahm's team swapped the studio for the soil and immersed themselves with rural farming families. They observed harvests, visited local markets, and documented farmers' lives on the agricultural margins. “For a while, we weren’t agency creatives... we were farmers,” Nahm said. The production timeline doubled to six or seven months, but what they gained was authenticity. “You can’t fake a calloused hand or the emotion behind a farmer’s pride.”
Behind the scenes: Director and farmers during the Jindo Green Onion Burger shoot
From this process came a series of hyper-localised burgers, each rooted in a specific region and ingredient: the Boseong Green Tea Pork Burger (June 2022), the Jindo Green Onion Burger (July 2023), and the latest, the Iksan Sweet Potato Mozzarella Burger and Muffin (July 2025), made with 200 tonnes of sweet potatoes sourced via local cooperatives in North Jeolla Province. Within nine days of its launch, the new burger had sold over one million units.
Challenges in a long-standing campaign
Now in its fifth year, the biggest challenge was keeping the concept fresh and consumer enthusiasm alive.
Nahm describes the approach, “We had to bring a fresh twist to our campaign each year with additional content beyond the main video.” For instance, in 2022, for the Boseong Green Tea Pork Burger, they produced a Korean folk music video expressing the joy of Boseong farmers, which genuinely "went viral on YouTube."
In 2023, for the Jindo Green Onion Burger, the agency brought the essence of the picturesque island to Seoul through an immersive pop-up. Instead of the typical zoomed-in burger shots, Leo built an immersive activation capturing the rich earth, rows of green onions, and a character tie-in with Koong-Ya—a beloved anthropomorphic veggie from the mobile game Koongya Catch Mind.
The team also learned from their missteps. During the Jinju Pepper Burger rollout, they regretted not having embedded themselves earlier in the local community. As a creative fix, they redesigned a McDonald’s outlet in Jinju to double as a tribute to local pepper farmers. And it doesn’t hurt if your local McDonald’s is renovated into a mini museum of regional pride.
The biggest challenge, however, was skirting a supply chain misstep. Because sourcing local ingredients is one thing but getting them into a nationwide supply chain on time, in bulk, and up to spec, is something else entirely. McDonald’s Korea operates around 400 restaurants in the country. The brand quickly realised that reviving regional agriculture couldn’t be done in a silo and logistical cooperation at scale is not solved by marketing muscle alone.
That’s where local governments came in. “We received a lot of support from regional governments, especially when it came to logistics,” says Lee. “They helped us set up contracts with farming co-ops and assisted with transportation infrastructure. Without that level of local coordination, it would’ve been nearly impossible to secure the volume and consistency we needed.”
The results
The cumulative numbers are impressive. As of April 2025, the campaign has sold more than 24 million items across five product cycles. That’s 800 tonnes of local produce pulled out of sleepy supply chains and shoved into the national spotlight. One burger, the Jindo Green Onion Burger, even landed McDonald’s Korea a Prime Minister’s Award, after sales helped onion farmers punch above their weight in markets they’d never reached.
Without divulging too much on specific revenue figures, Lee said, "Sales of our 'Taste of Korea' items are roughly 30% higher than other limited-time menu items."
“And beyond revenue, we’ve seen brand trust scores rise by 3.3 points year-on-year.” The PR value alone is estimated to be over US$4 million. Metal haul at awards has been frequent, including the APAC Effie Awards 2024, AdFest 2025, and Spikes Asia 2025.
The bigger impact is the ripple effect of the conscious food movement.
Convenience chain Emart24 has partnered with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety to develop regional ingredient items like bulgogi chive gimbap using Sancheong chives and tomato sandwiches with produce from Hadong. Starbucks Korea, since 2022, has run its own loconomy-inspired programme, distributing ingredients like Jeju hallabong citrus and Gongju chestnuts to 100 small cafes each year under its "mutual growth beverage" initiative.
Still, public sentiment remains measured.
An Embrain Trend Monitor survey conducted in May 2024 found that while only 22.1% of Koreans were familiar with the term "loconomy," a whopping 80% believed such efforts supported local economies. However, 61.6% noted that prices for loconomy products were relatively high, and nearly half thought of it as a fad.
Lee isn’t fazed. “We’re not chasing hype,” she said. “We’re building a platform that’s hard to replicate because it’s built on long-term relationships and not one-off promotions.”
For a brand long associated with global sameness, McDonald’s Korea is proving that the golden arches can also be green. And a truly Happy Meal stretches beyond feeding cravings to nourish the people behind the produce and find meaning in the soil beneath its supply chain.
