The owners of the Utah-based fast-casual Korean barbecue chain Cupbop got to make their pitch on ABC’s entrepreneurial reality show “Shark Tank.”
Cupbop’s Jung Song and Dok Kwon recently taped their appearance on the show, alongside three other businesses. They pitched the idea of Korean barbecue in a cup to a panel of the “sharks,” who this season include Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Daymond John, Robert Herjavec and Kevin O’Leary.
Yeiri Kim, Song’s wife and company co-owner, said she can’t share many details about Cupbop’s appearance until after the show airs on Monday. She could say that the sharks tried some Korean barbecue — and that Song has aspired to be on the show for years.
Song, Kim said, “is very fun and funny, whimsical. He’s different, and he’s kind of crazy. He always talked about this ‘Shark Tank’ show all the time, and I thought we weren’t ready. And then last year when he mentioned it, I said, ‘Maybe we’re too big to go on the show, because we’re pretty established at this point.’”
On “Shark Tank,” for those who haven’t seen it since it debuted in 2009, small business owners and entrepreneurs stand before a line of would-be investors, or “sharks,” who decide whether they will invest in the company.
(Christopher Willard | ABC) Jung Song and Dok Kwon pitch their Utah company, Cupbop, on ABC's reality show "Shark Tank." The episode is scheduled to air Monday, May 2, 2022.
Cuban, by the way, was in Utah this week overseeing one of his investments: He’s the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and was sitting behind his team’s bench at Vivint Smart Home Arena on Thursday as they knocked the Utah Jazz out of the NBA playoffs.
The show’s airing comes close to another milestone for the business: Cupbop will mark its ninth anniversary on Wednesday. To celebrate, the chain will offer any cup for $5.99.
Kim recounted Cupbop’s origin story: “My husband came home from work and he told me, ‘Hey, I want to do a food truck with Korean barbecue.’ And at the time we had three children. And I said, ‘You want to do a food truck just like that?’ And my husband said, ‘We always wanted to open our own restaurant business.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but a restaurant, right?’”
Before his declaration, Kim said, Song had attended a food convention where there wasn’t a single Korean food booth. He also had recently watched a documentary about Korean street food. The two experiences converged to inspire the food truck concept, and shortly thereafter, Cupbop was born.
Kim said it was Song’s sense of fun and whimsy that helped kick-start the business. When they drove their first trailer to a food-truck meetup at Salt Lake City’s Gallivan Center in 2013, it was one of only 20 food trucks on the street — though several of them had devoted followings.
“Our very first day, we were surrounded by two popular food trucks with huge lines,” Kim said. “There was not a single person in front of our food truck.”
What happened next, Kim said, speaks to her husband’s personality. “He’s a fun person,” she said. “If you have a coin or a pen, pen is to write, coin is to pay, but my husband always looks at things from different angles. Everything he sees is a tool to play with.”
Kim said that Inside the trailer, as Song watched the other trucks and the long lines for them, “he still wanted to have fun. So he was dancing in the trailer, and the trailer was dancing up and down, and even if people had no interest in our food, people thought, ‘What the heck are they? Who are they?’”
That’s when people started trying Cupbop’s food, Kim said, “and soon it went viral in a month or two.”
In 2015, Cupbop opened its first brick-and-mortar restaurant, in Provo, near the Brigham Young University campus. The chain now has 36 locations in Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Oklahoma, and more than 100 locations in Indonesia. They also maintain a number of food trucks.
The food, Kim said, is quite similar to what was served out of that bouncing trailer in the Gallivan Center nine years ago — though they have added fried options at their restaurants.
Cupbop’s appearance on “Shark Tank” is scheduled to air Monday, May 2, at 8 p.m. Mountain time, on ABC — in Utah, that’s KTVX, Ch. 4.
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