Orion (오리온)

Orion launched the Choco Pie in 1974: two biscuits, a marshmallow, a chocolate coating. It became South Korea's emblematic industrial cake, handed out in barracks, distributed at school, its name welded to the word jeong — that hard-to-translate affective attachment the brand's advertising used as a slogan for thirty years.

Its strangest chapter played out at the Kaesong industrial complex, where South Korean employers handed them to North Korean workers. Rather than eat them, the workers resold them on the black market: the Choco Pie served there as a store of value, to the point that Pyongyang eventually banned its distribution.