We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Janet Kim a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Janet, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

YOLI YANGNYUM (first product of Yoli Pantry) was where it started.

I cannot point to one singular moment when this idea came together. It felt more like a seedling that grew through observations and the cultural moment we were living through – the growing global recognition and appreciation for Korean food.

From years of cooking Korean food at home, I noticed that most classic Korean dishes are pretty accessible to make if you have the essential pantry ingredients. With home cooking, apart from the fundamental ingredients, recipes naturally get adapted to each household’s taste and what’s available.

Enthusiasm for kimchi fermentation and the flavor profile was growing as well. However there seemed to be a barrier for most home cooks, and that was the overwhelming product selection, and the knowledge gap behind fundamental Korean ingredients.

Yoli Yangnyum started as a solution for any home cook to use for kimchi fermentation. Ideally, Yoli Yangnyum would be a product with all of the fundamental kimchi ingredients already blended together. But the challenge of deciding what would go into the paste—which variation of kimchi to honor—was tough because there are so many different approaches. But I started to see this as our advantage rather than a problem. We could create something that respected traditional methods while making them accessible to people who’d never made kimchi before.

The timing made sense too. Korean cuisine and flavors are more familiar. Curious home cooks are genuinely interested in cooking with authentic flavors. That’s where we come in. Yoli Yangnyum has evolved and isn’t categorized to just kimchi. It is a seasoning that blends mainstay ingredients for classic dishes, or simple flavor enhancement. The pantry product’s role in a kitchen is ‘flavor’ and ‘versatility’, and that’s the value behind every Yoli Pantry product – Flavor and Versatility.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Janet Kim, and I started Yoli Pantry to bring authentic Korean flavors to home kitchens through original pantry products using staple Korean ingredients.

I grew up in LA’s with Korean immigrant parents. Food was always central to our family—you know how in Korean culture, we greet each other by asking “Did you eat?” It’s really about showing you care. My earliest memories are of family dinners at places like Kobawoo, sharing bossam and kalbi, or eating my grandmother’s cooking in her small downtown apartment.

I started working at a restaurant in college and fell in love with it—the energy, the team dynamics and of course the food. That led me to work in restaurant operations for some well-known chefs like Barbara Lynch in Boston and Daniel Boulud in New York.

When I moved to abroad to Hong Kong for work, I got homesick and started cooking Korean food in my tiny apartment kitchen. I’d hunt down ingredients from the one Korean grocer on the island, trying to recreate the tastes of home. That period really connected me back to my culinary roots.

After spending some years in specialty coffee, I kept feeling this pull toward starting my own business. I knew that if I was going to put my name on something, it had to be related to Korean food.

Yoli means “to cook” in Korean – and we launched in February 2025. Our main product right now is Yoli Yangnyum, which is a versatile gochugaru (chili pepper) seasoning (paste).

Korean food is having this huge moment globally, but there’s still this gap for home cooks. Home cooks love the flavors and are curious to create, and we’re here to provide just that, a foundational flavor base to cook with Korean ingredients.

Through this process I became very obsessed with ingredient sourcing. I use the best gochugaru from specific regions in Korea and work with local producers for the fresh ingredients. Everything comes down to taste—I had a specific flavor profile to work with and worked backwards to find the right ingredients to create it. It took forever, but it was worth it.

What I love most is seeing how people use our products in totally unexpected ways. Someone will tell me they use it as a dip for chips or spread it on a sandwich, and I’m like, “Yes, exactly!” Korean flavors just taste good on everything.

I want to create what I call “user generational products”—things that actually change how people think about and use Korean flavors in their everyday cooking. Not just as this exotic, special-occasion thing, but as something that becomes intuitive and normal.

This isn’t just a business for me—it’s about sharing my culture through food. I want Korean flavors to feel accessible to everyone, whether you’re Korean-American like me or you’ve never tried Korean food before.

Korean cooking is really about flexibility and making things your own. It’s not about following rigid recipes—it’s about having good foundational flavors and adapting them to what you like and what you have available.

That’s what I hope Yoli Pantry does: gives people that foundation so they can start experimenting and making Korean flavors part of their regular cooking routine.

How did you build your audience on social media?

We started just a few months ago – however, this is one subject that I have full focus on. When developing a product that doesn’t already exist, there is an educational element involved. I have used this as an opportunity to share how to create Korean classic dishes, with recipes, online – using the products. This gives me an opportunity to talk about classic dishes, what the ingredients are, and how to use our product to create these dishes at home.

With social media, one thing that I have been committed to is being consistent in posting. It’s a lot of work, but gets a bit easier when you are very organized. My hopes is that the educational element, and the consistency will pay off with followers that enjoy the content and ultimately use the product.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

The most supportive tool I have as an entrepreneur right now is my Ashtanga yoga practice. The discipline involved in the practice has deeply impacted in the discipline required for starting a new business. Any yoga practice is self-reflective, and this has been helpful in understanding how certain challenges that have come up can be overcome through dedication and mindfulness. Overall, a daily Ashtanga practice has helped me deepen my the ability to listen and trust to myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yolipantry.com
• Instagram: @yolipantry
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janet-kim1978/
• Youtube: @yolipantry