Facility churns out 60% of Bibigo’s stateside mandu for US business worth over 80% of CJ’s overseas revenue
Dumplings are packaged on the production line at CJ CheilJedang’s Beaumont plant in California. (CJ CheilJedang)
Korea Herald correspondent
BEAUMONT, California — CJ Group’s three-day K-pop and Korean culture festival, KCON LA 2026, drew 142,000 fans, and for many of them, the food may have mattered just as much as the music, with over 10,000 people lining up to try US-made Korean dishes at the booth run by the group’s flagship Korean food brand, Bibigo.
Few attendees likely knew, however, that the mandu, or Korean dumplings, on their plate traced back to a plant not far away. The factory in Beaumont, about 150 kilomters east of Los Angeles, supplies over 60 percent of Bibigo mandu sold in the US.
“Beaumont is the largest facility we operate in the US,” Mellisa Thompson-Troupe, vice president of Asian food manufacturing at CJ Schwan’s, a subsidiary of CJ CheilJedang, said during a briefing on Aug. 14. “We produce not just our biggest volume of Asian items here, but also some of our most globally competitive products.”
Opened in 2019, the plant sits on a 41,250-square-meter site and employs more than 600 people, running lines for dumplings, fried rice, noodles and seaweed.
Inside the plant, rice is stir-fried with oil, then stir-fried again with a mix of ingredients on the fried rice line. Nearby, on the dumpling line, prepared filling was fed into a forming machine, resulting in uniformly shaped dumplings running along a conveyor belt. The dumplings moved through the next phases of steaming and quick-freezing before packaging, then traveled onward via equipment that’s nearly 70 percent automated, the company said.
The factory puts out around 160 metric tons of dumplings daily, with Bibigo-branded dumplings accounting for nearly three-quarters of that. Each dumpling weighs about 187 grams, so the plant produces more than 860,000 dumplings a day.
Mellisa Thompson-Troupe, vice president of Asian food manufacturing at CJ Schwan’s, gives a briefing at the Beaumont plant in California on Aug. 14. (CJ CheilJedang)
At the core of CJ CheilJedang’s strategy is localization, reshaping its Korean lineup with American sensibilities. Where pork and chive fillings are standard in Korea, for instance, the US operation favors chicken and cilantro, ingredients better attuned to local palates.
“What matters most is listening to local consumers,” Thompson-Troupe said. “Our localization strategy takes the basic framework of Korean food and reworks it to match what local consumers are looking for.”
CJ CheilJedang began building its American food business in 2005 with the acquisition of Annie Chun’s, followed by Omni Food in 2009, TMI Trading in 2013 and Kahiki Foods in 2019. The 2019 acquisition of US frozen-food maker Schwan’s Company marked a turning point, dramatically scaling up its US operations.
The company now operates 20 plants across the US, producing not only Bibigo dumplings, cooked rice and sauces but also pizzas and desserts for Schwan bands. Bibigo’s Korean lineup, including its mandu, is sold in roughly 80,000 stores across the US, spanning major retail channels such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco.
The growth in production and distribution has followed through to the bottom line. CJ CheilJedang’s US food business, which makes up 83 percent of its total overseas revenue, rose from 3.32 trillion won ($2.4 billion) in 2020 to 4.91 trillion won in 2025.
According to Federico Arreola, president of the Asian cuisine business unit at CJ Schwan’s, Bibigo’s performance in North America stands as proof that Korean cuisine is settling into the everyday diets in the US. Bibigo dumplings led the US dumpling market with a 41 percent share in 2024, while Schwan’s Red Baron topped the frozen pizza market with a 20.8 percent share.
“CJ Schwan’s is already the No. 1 player in the total Asian category, with a 12.6 percent share in the US,” he said. “In frozen specifically, we’re at 25 percent, meaning 1 out of 4 frozen Asian items sold in the US is ours.”
He added that the company would build on this momentum to push forward with other global strategic products, such as ready-to-eat rice, chicken, seaweed snacks, kimchi and Korean sauces, carrying Bibigo onto tables around the world as a truly global brand.
CJ CheilJedang is also building what it says will be North America’s largest, state-of-the-art Asian food plant in South Dakota, targeting operations to begin next year.
CJ CheilJedang’s Beaumont plant in California (CJ CheilJedang)
minmin@heraldcorp.com