The flaming-hot Korean noodle brand going viral and making millions

Seoul: Park Jin hee remembers the first time that he tried South Korea s famed fire chicken noodles. Huddling with a group of friends in his high sc...

Seoul: Park Jin-hee remembers the first time that he tried South Korea’s famed "fire chicken noodles.” Huddling with a group of friends in his high school dormitory about a decade ago, each person took turns slurping them down - a competition to see who was the best at tolerating the heat.

"It was so spicy that I cried, but it was also so addictive that I ended up eating it all,” Park, now a 27-year-old nurse and food YouTuber. "And even though I had an upset stomach the next day, I ended up coming back to it again. It’s a magical food.”

The heat level of Buldak ramyeon - the Korean word for ramen - depends on individual tolerance. Its spiciness tends to build in one’s mouth, curbed only by a touch of sweetness or a sprinkle of artificial cheese flavor. What’s not subjective is how hot the noodles are right now - what started in South Korea as a spicy food challenge in the early 2010s has become a nearly ubiquitous junk food at home and a cash cow internationally, a long way from ramyeon’s status as a postwar filler food that the government once had to force the public to eat.

Globally, Buldak has been buoyed by an enduring social media trend where users try it and react on camera. The instant noodle brand is tagged in more than 360 million posts on TikTok and has garnered hundreds of millions, if not billions, of views on YouTube. It’s so popular that Denmark’s recent move to ban some of the spiciest Buldak varieties made headlines around the world - though its maker, Samyang, has disputed the Danish calculations, according to South Korean media reports.

And the appetite for Buldak shows no sign of flagging. Samyang announced last year that more than $2.3 billion worth of Buldak products had been sold globally since the brand was launched in 2012. The company recently reported that first-quarter U.S. sales of its products had leaped nearly 210 percent from the previous year - and its stock was catapulted to a record high last month, not long after Cardi B posted a video of herself trying it.