Q&A

Years ago, while I was leading the ready-meal development team at Lotte Central Research Institute in Seoul, we made an unusual hire. Not a young PhD. Not a global consulting firm. A retired engineer from Toyo Seikan, Japan’s leading can and packaging manufacturer.

He flew in and worked with us five days a month. Within months, problems that had slowed our lines for years began to disappear — one after another. He wasn’t teaching us new science. He was handing us thirty years of failures we no longer had to repeat.

That experience taught me something I have never forgotten: the fastest way to transfer technology across borders is not a licence, a textbook or a machine. It is a person who has already made the mistakes.

Today, I am on the other side of that arrangement. What that Japanese engineer gave our team, I would like to offer yours.

Who I Am

My name is Jeongmin Choi. I have spent 32 years in food industry R&D in South Korea — one of the world’s most demanding and fast-moving food markets.

•     25 years at Lotte Central Research Institute, the R&D hub of the Lotte Group — rising from beverage researcher to head of the Alcoholic Beverages Team and executive head (SVP) of the Ready Meals & Convenience Foods Team.

•     2 years as an official technical advisor to the same institute after retirement — so I know exactly how a good advisory arrangement works, from both sides of the table.

•     Currently CTO and Head of R&D at a Korean food-tech company, developing vegan butter, egg-white replacers and long-life ambient bakery products — with 32 patents filed or registered in recent years.

Along the way, my teams delivered products that defined their categories in Korea: the country’s first chilled juice, its first 0.00% alcohol-free beer, its first commercially sterilised (retort) baby food, and chilled and ambient long-life bakery products — as well as hit drinks, soju, whisky, ready meals and desserts that are still on shelves today.

What I Can Help You With

If your company or research institute is building capabilities that Korea developed over the past three decades, I can help you skip years of trial and error in areas such as:

•     Thermal processing & food safety — sterilisation, pasteurisation, retort and aseptic process design; F-value setting; shelf-life extension without preservatives.

•     Ready meals & ready-to-eat foods — product design, formulation and process set-up for rice dishes, noodles, sauces and packed-lunch products; chilled and ambient food safety systems.

•     Beverages & alcoholic drinks — juices, carbonated and functional drinks; soju, beer, whisky and sake-style rice wine; blending, fermentation, distillation and maturation technology.

•     Plant-based & future foods — vegan butter, egg replacers (foaming agents), meat alternatives, high-protein and low-sugar products.

•     Factory & quality systems — commissioning and stabilisation of new production lines, plant hygiene programmes, raw-material specification and sourcing strategy.

•     Cost and profit structure — formulation and process optimisation that cuts cost without cutting quality; I have repeatedly delivered measurable P&L improvements, not just technical reports.

I Have Done This Across Borders Before

Cross-border technology transfer is not new to me. I led the acquisition and line improvement of a beverage plant in China and transferred production technology to the local team. I established a finished-whisky production system in Scotland. I developed export products tailored to the Japanese and Russian markets. I know what it takes to make technology work in someone else’s factory, culture and regulatory environment.

How We Can Work Together

The engagement model is flexible and designed around your needs:

•     Periodic on-site advisory — for example, several days a month at your site: the same proven format we used with our Japanese advisor.

•     Intensive project support — focused residencies for line commissioning, new product launches or troubleshooting.

•     Remote advisory — regular video sessions, document and formulation reviews.

Terms and conditions are discussed individually, depending on scope, duration and location. Technical communication in English and Japanese is workable; for in-depth technical sessions, an interpreter arrangement can be discussed.

Let’s Talk

If your organisation wants to shorten its learning curve with someone who has already walked the road — from lab bench to production line to P&L — I would be glad to hear about your challenges.

📧  Contact: rndjmchoi@gmail.com

Please briefly describe your company, your product area and the challenge you are facing. I personally read and answer every enquiry.