Choco Pie
🥚 VegetarianThe choco pie is a snack cake made of two small round layers of cake with a marshmallow filling and a chocolate coating. It originated in the United States but is now especially popular in South Korea, where it is an everyday treat and a name used for the whole category.
History
Early versions of this marshmallow cake date back to 1917 in the southern United States. In 1929, Chattanooga Bakery created the Moon Pie, with marshmallow filling and Graham crackers, for miners in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1961, the Japanese company Morinaga & Company began selling a product developed with reference to the Scooter Pie, a version of the Moon Pie.
The Korean version emerged in 1973, when a member of the R&D team at Tongyang Confectionery, after visiting a hotel in Georgia, was inspired by chocolate-coated sweets and began experimenting with a chocolate biscuit cake. Tongyang's Orion Choco Pie made the name popular, and the company eventually renamed itself Orion Confectionery. In 1979, Lotte began selling a similar snack, spelling the prefix differently in Hangul. In 1999, Tongyang sued Lotte over the term, but the court ruled that "choco pie" had become a common noun.
Culture
In South Korea, the choco pie is an affordable everyday snack, popular with children and older people alike. It has sold in Russia since the early 1990s, where it became widely loved, and since the 2000s Orion has taken it to China, Vietnam and other markets. Its presence in North Korea drew attention in the 2010s, when workers at the Kaesong Industrial Complex received choco pies alongside their wages and some resold them on the black market. Similar snacks under other names are now made in many countries.
Legend and fact
It is often said that the idea came from a visit to a hotel in Georgia, though that account is not documented in detail. What is well established is the line of American and Japanese snacks that preceded it.