A pizza seolgi from GS25 sold out its five thousand pre-orders and goes nationwide on 5 November. CU’s rice-cake sales are up 96 percent this year. The chewy dessert that was your grandmother’s is the one twenty-somethings are driving across town for.
Written by the Kverything editors from the sources below. Photograph by 주언 김 on Unsplash. Last checked November 3, 2026.
떡 is rice cake: steamed or pounded rice, chewy, lightly sweet, cut into blocks or rolled around a filling. It was ceremonial food and a grandmother’s snack. This year it is the dessert, and the convenience stores have noticed.
GS25 and the dessert chain 설빙 made a 피자설기, a block of white rice cake topped with pizza sauce, cheese, pepperoni and corn, two pieces for 3,900 won, to be heated in the microwave. The app pre-order of 5,000 sold out before the end of October; it reaches every store on 5 November. CU has a pumpkin 인절미 and a dark-chocolate mochi, 7-Eleven an injeolmi and a black-sesame tteok.
The queue came first. Famous rice-cake shops, the butter-tteok and fruit-tteok makers and the old-name shops, had lines outside them this year, and the habit got a name, 떡지순례, a tteok pilgrimage. The chains followed with their own versions. CU says its rice-cake sales are up 96.5 percent this year and 7-Eleven says 62; one newspaper counted purchases by people under twenty up 45 percent in a year.
Two things made it travel. The texture, 쫀득, chewy, is what this year’s desserts are about. And foreign visitors have started treating tteok as the Korean dessert, which gives it a second audience.
Look in the chilled or frozen dessert case, not the snack aisle. Pizza seolgi is heated in the store microwave; most others are eaten cold. One piece is a snack; the two-pack is a meal.
For the shops that started it, go in the morning. The famous ones sell out by early afternoon and do not take orders by phone.
Any GS25 from 5 November for the pizza seolgi. Any CU or 7-Eleven for theirs now.
Do you still have the pizza seolgi?