#4 – Can a Subway-Style Kimbap Shop Make Money?

It took me more than two weeks to post this fourth Money Machine piece — the classical concert one must have taken a lot out of me 😅. I had made a personal rule of writing at least one post every two weeks, so having fallen behind left me with a nagging guilt, like a summer diary left untouched until the last day of vacation.

Introduction

Lately I've been hearing a lot about kimbap shops, for some reason. A friend said kimbap is the one food they'd choose if they could only eat one thing for a week. And the triggering moment was probably visiting a new place near my office — a subway-style kimbap shop where you pick your own fresh ingredients. On top of that, a personal experience also shaped my choice of topic.

A few years ago, when I traveled to New Zealand, I visited what locals were calling a 'sushi restaurant,' expecting Japanese sushi — and felt a bit betrayed (?) to find various California rolls. As a Korean, I could see it was really a Western-style variant of a kimbap shop. Another interesting detail: those 'sushi restaurants' were almost exclusively run by Korean immigrant families. It's a personal observation, so I can't generalize, but I thought: Koreans, being familiar with kimbap, could re-brand it as 'sushi' (a form of upscaling), swap the fillings for locally popular ingredients like avocado and salmon, and that could make for a solid business in a foreign country.

These observations merged together, and I became curious: if a subway-style kimbap shop could make good money (in Korea), could I eventually open one like this if I ever emigrated?

🌯 The Revenue Structure of 'That' Subway-Style Kimbap Shop

The shop appears to still be in its early stages, so I've chosen not to name the brand directly — tagging it could feel like targeting, for better or worse. I'll describe it without revealing the name.

Basic Information

• Location: 5-minute walk from Seongsu Station
• Menu: 13 kimbap varieties (average price 6,223 KRW), tteokbokki, salad noodles, cup ramen, yuzu muk (acorn jelly) bowl, carbonated drinks, dipping sauces (basil pesto, tomato gochujang, etc.)
• Features:
  • Orders placed via kiosk (not Subway-style where you verbally direct each ingredient to staff)
  • Rice type can be selected at no extra charge: white rice / mixed brown rice & oats / black rice
  • In addition to the 13 base combinations, fillings can be added or removed (e.g., hold the cucumber)

Beyond the basics, I ran the numbers as if I were opening this shop as a first directly-owned location, estimating cost of goods sold, SG&A, and capital expenditures as shown in the tables below.

Estimated P&L for a 'subway-style kimbap shop' across three scenarios

Assumptions in the Table Above

• Scenario 1 assumes an average ticket of 10,623 KRW.

  • The shop's concept of 'healthy kimbap' targets women in their 20s–30s for dietary purposes → assumed the typical order would be "one kimbap + yuzu muk bowl + sauce"

• Scenario 2 assumes an average ticket of 8,000 KRW.

  • A more conservative figure, using the current average solo dining spend for office workers.

• No delivery service, so revenue is split between (1) dine-in and (2) takeout.

  • Dine-in: 13 pyeong space, 17 seats, 51 total weekly operating hours
  • Takeout revenue assumed at 50% of dine-in; based on an OpenSurvey finding where the dine-in:takeout ratio was 2:1

• Food cost ratio assumed at 40%.

  • As this is not a franchise location, there's no supply chain cost advantage from a franchisor
  • Higher than the industry average of 33.3%; lower than the ~45% seen in franchise snack shops where the franchisor earns on ingredient supply

• Labor: 3 staff assumed.

  • During my visit, there was no separate floor staff — three people total were making and serving kimbap (spreading rice and adding fillings / rolling and slicing / microwave prep + delivering to customers)
  • Menu was simplified to eliminate kitchen cooking entirely
  • Only 3 non-kimbap menu items → minimal dishwashing
  • With minimal kitchen and dishwashing load, three staff should be able to handle ingredient prep during open and break time

• Hourly wage of 9,800 KRW applied, based on Subway's posted rate on part-time job boards.

• Weekday: 5 days × 8 hours, including weekly holiday pay + 4 insurance → monthly salary 2,250,000 KRW

• Weekend: 2 days × total 12 hours, no 4 insurance → monthly salary 500,000 KRW

• Credit card fee rate varies by annual revenue: 1.1%–1.25%

• Marketing, design, and occasional outsourcing costs included in contingency reserve.

• Assuming one location run as a sole proprietorship → personal income tax applied.

• Scenario 3 assumes replacing the 'rolling and slicing' role with a commercial kimbap-rolling machine and reducing headcount by one.

  • Yamsem Kimbap (a real franchise) already advertises providing a 14 million KRW automated cooking machine free to franchisees.
  • In practice, kimbap-dedicated staff require skilled technique and typically command higher wages than general staff.

Finally, the upfront capital expenditure for setting up the shop:

Initial setup capital expenditure

🤜🤛 Comparison — Franchise Kimbap Shop Revenue Structure

Looking at the subway-style kimbap revenue structure naturally made me curious about how it compares to opening a franchise kimbap location. Researching this, I found that franchise headquarters are legally required by the Franchise Business Act to disclose key business information to the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Using the information on the KFTC's disclosure portal, I compiled a comparison of several kimbap franchise structures in the table below.

Kimbap franchise structure comparison table

Comparing the standalone shop structure with the franchise model in simple terms: if you have a differentiating idea for your shop and are willing to invest more of your own time, intelligence, and energy in the early stages — with a startup-founder mindset — starting an independent kimbap shop seems like the path to greater profit. Otherwise, entering an already-built franchise system is the safer choice.

🧠 Thoughts That Came to Mind

Preparing all of this triggered quite a few thoughts:

1. Average ticket price matters enormously.
   a. If you can plan and differentiate your menu, you can build a standalone shop rather than going the franchise route.
   b. But keep in mind: differentiated menus with hard-to-source ingredients raise the cost of goods — and intangible management costs (stress...?).
2. The difference of one employee's wages has a huge impact.
   a. If I ever get the chance to talk to food-tech startups developing kitchen robots, I'd like to recommend subway-style kimbap as a restaurant type where they could build a real competitive edge.
3. Annual net profit is not as small as you might expect.
   a. I'd always heard the common story of earning 4–5 million KRW a month opening a chicken shop after retirement — but done well, monthly income of 10 million KRW seems achievable.
   b. From a personal standpoint, the initial investment of 100 million KRW is still a burden, and there are many ways to deploy that capital elsewhere with better returns for the effort.
   c. The hidden costs and risks embedded in earning 60–100 million KRW net per year as a kimbap shop owner need to be considered: the cost of capital on the initial investment, hiring and managing part-time staff, ingredient procurement and management, endless administrative tasks, and the need to be on call at all times.
4. There aren't many levers to pull to increase net profit.
   a. There are clear limits to how much you can grow revenue or cut costs from a single location.
   b. This means that if you want to evolve from a 'mom-and-pop shop → a business,' you'd need to get into the franchise business rather than the food service itself.

Closing Thoughts

Honestly, I started this post with a fun happy daydream: could doing a subway-style kimbap shop really well overseas lead to a global food brand like McDonald's or Subway? But I suppose "the more you know, the more it hurts" applies here 🤪. Having broken down the structure this carefully, the thought of opening one kimbap location and running it day after day feels suffocating. The survival instincts of the shop owners who grind every single day in the food industry are something to admire — and this thought experiment gave me an indirect but vivid experience of why 'business' and 'shop' are different things.

Being more interested in the startup world, I also found myself comparing this to starting a startup. The depth of deliberation and seriousness required to decide to start a kimbap shop is no less than what's required to start a startup. If anything, the day-to-day pressure of running a kimbap shop might be even more acute. And from a P&L perspective, since startups typically generate zero revenue early on, running a shop clearly wins. But then why do we usually think of startups as more valuable? Starting a startup is an attempt to leap directly to the 'business' stage — one that runs on systems — and it's the 'expectation' of being able to build that business structure that ultimately creates the value. Thinking it through this far, it seems that there is nothing inherently impressive about merely having started a startup — the only thing truly worthy of applause is having successfully made the jump from startup to business.

I'm surprised at how long this post turned out — clearly I thought through this topic quite seriously. My thoughts got away from me toward the end, so the conclusion doesn't land cleanly, but this was a post with unexpected lessons, and I expect it will stay with me for a long time.