Pepero Day (빼빼로데이, Nov 11) is not an official holiday and nobody has to give anything. It is a gift-swapping custom built around Lotte’s chocolate-dipped biscuit stick, and the entry ticket is one box at about **2,000 won** as of the February 2025 price hike. Sources disagree on when it began and how big it is.
I treat any claim that smells like marketing as something to audit. Five weeks out, here is the audit of the origin and sales numbers, plus what I will actually buy.
## What does Pepero Day look like in our house?
My seven-year-old daughter’s kindergarten class does a swap every year. She wants to hand out small boxes to her friends. My wife, who is an ENFP (the impulsive, enthusiastic type in the MBTI personality test), wants the giant box, the one as long as a forearm, for the sheer joy of it. I am the ISTJ in this marriage, so I priced it. With a class of 20 (I am making up the class size to show the scale), 20 standard boxes at 2,000 won come to **40,000 won**. One giant box for my wife is a separate line item.
Neither number is scary. What bothered me was the question my daughter asked: “Why is it today?” I realized I could not answer, and my guess that the date was “just the four ones” was only a guess.
The date itself is the easy part. Nov 11 is written 11/11, four straight lines, and the sticks look like the number 1. The harder part is everything people say after that.
## Where did Pepero Day really come from? (1994, 1996 or 1997)
Pepero (빼빼로, from ppaeppae, “skinny”) went on sale in Korea in **1983**. Japan’s Pocky, from Ezaki Glico, is older, launched in **1966**, and the two products look alike. The holiday is a separate story, and the sources split on the year.
| Claim | Who says it | How much I trust it |
|---|---|---|
| Middle school girls in Busan (Yeongnam region, southeast) swapped Pepero in 1994 | A Lotte branding manager quoted by Seoul Eats (2011) | Medium. Insider memory, but it comes from the company with a stake in the story. |
| First media record is a 1996 article about teenage girls swapping Pepero to “be tall and thin” | Korea Times (Nov 2024) and Asiae (2024) | Highest. A dated, checkable press record, though it only proves the custom existed by then. |
| Lotte began using the name and handing out free Pepero in big cities the following year (1997) | Korea Times (Nov 2024), which says “the following year”; 1997 is my conversion from 1996 | Medium-high. This is the date marketing joined the custom, not the date it began. |
Read together, the three dates do not contradict each other as much as they look like they do. 1994 is a memory of a folk habit, 1996 is the first paper trail, and 1997 is Lotte stepping in. My working version: a regional teenage custom came first, and the company amplified it a year or so after the press noticed. That is my reading, not a sourced conclusion, and nobody I found documents the exact handoff.
The founding “skinny” story has an awkward edge. The girls were wishing to be thin, so the day began as a mild body-image ritual, which sits oddly with how cheerfully it is sold now.
## How much of Lotte’s year is this one day?
This is the number everyone repeats, and it varies from 30% to 70%.
| Figure | Window it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 30% of annual sales; 83x the sales of two weeks earlier | The week around Nov 11 | Korea Times (2014) |
| About 50% of annual supply delivered | September to November | Asiae (2024) |
| 70% share: “some say”, but the reporter found it not quite that level | Not stated, unverified | Asiae (2024) |
| About 60% of annual sales | Around Pepero Day (before and after, not the day alone) | Wikipedia |
| About 84x normal daily sales | The day itself, daily average versus a normal day | Wikipedia |
The windows are different: one week, three months, an unspecified period, the stretch around the day, and the day itself. A week at 30% and a season at 50% can both be true. The 60% is a window around the date and the 84x is a one-day multiple, so they are not the same kind of number and should not be stacked. I could not open Wikipedia’s primary source, so I trust the range, and I do not quote a single number.
All figures here are old or secondhand. The 83x figure is from 2014. What is firmer is the business size: Lotte projected 2025 Pepero revenue near **241.5 billion won**, about 141.5 billion domestic and over 100 billion in exports. Exports were about **70.1 billion won** in 2024, up 30% from 54 billion in 2023. Pepero also topped a snack ranking on 2025 retail point-of-sale data (**145.6 billion won**), and Lotte says it has sold about 3.7 billion units over its life.
One more dated data point, 2014: in a survey cited by Korea Times, 7 in 10 respondents said swapping Pepero is not necessary. That suggests many see the exchange as optional.
That has not stopped them joining in.
## Who gives what to whom, and what does it cost in 2026?
There is no rulebook. What follows is my own read of how people around me behave, so treat it as a field note, not a poll.
| Recipient | What is normal | What would feel off |
|---|---|---|
| Partner | A giant box, or a box plus a small gift. The oversized one is the joke and the gesture. | Skipping it silently if the other person likes the day. |
| Friends | One standard box, often swapped back and forth. | An expensive gift. It breaks the playful scale. |
| Coworkers | A small box on a desk, or a shared pack in the pantry. | Singling out your boss with a pricey item. Keep it light. |
| Kid’s class | Small boxes for everyone, handed out the same way to each child. | Giving only some children a box. Check with the teacher on class rules first. |
For the price ladder, the verified points are these. Seoul Eats cited **800-1,000 won** for a box in 2011. Lotte raised original Choco Pepero (54g) from **1,800 to 2,000 won** effective **Feb 17, 2025**, in an average 9.5% increase across 26 products, blaming record cocoa prices. So the standard box has roughly doubled-plus in 15 years. I did not find a confirmed further hike in 2026, so read “2,000 won” as the 2025 price. A convenience-store listing aggregator showed team-edition 54g Choco Pepero boxes (the baseball-club editions) at 2,000 won with a 2+1 promotion in August 2026: three boxes for about 4,000 won, or roughly 1,333 each. That is a promo snapshot on a limited edition, not a list price for the standard box.
I am not listing exact prices for giant and gift boxes. I could not verify them at the shelf, and they vary by store and event. Check the shelf tag, since gift sets likely cost more than a standard box. The homemade route (melted chocolate, pretzel or biscuit sticks, sprinkles) costs whatever your ingredients cost. It is also the route I would try with my daughter, since a seven-year-old can do the dipping.
I covered the same kind of price creep in kimbap recently (see my post on why a roll of kimbap is almost 4,000 won in Seoul). Different ingredients, same squeeze on a cheap everyday item.
## What else is Nov 11, and what if I want to skip it?
Nov 11 is a crowded date. It is also **Farmers’ Day** (농업인의 날, nongeobin-ui nal), an official commemorative day created in **1996**. The date was chosen because the Chinese characters for “earth” (土) appear twice in 土月土日, “earth month, earth day,” and 土 can be split into 十 and 一, which reads as 11. It is not a day off. Since **2006** the agriculture ministry has also promoted it as **Garaetteok Day** (가래떡데이, garaetteok-day), garaetteok being long cylindrical rice cakes, to boost rice consumption.
So the same date has three identities: a snack holiday, a farming commemoration, and a rice-cake campaign. The latter two are public-sector efforts, and the first is a product that grew out of a teenage custom. The rice-cake campaign is hard to dismiss as pure sales pitch, since its goal was farm demand. But I cannot say how many people actually eat garaetteok that day, and I did not find a source that does.
If you want to skip: nothing happens. Nobody checks, and I found no law or workplace rule covering it. If you want to join cheaply, buy two or three standard boxes and give them without ceremony. If you want a gesture that fits the date and avoids Lotte, a bag of garaetteok from a market is a fair alternative, even if your kid will be more excited by the chocolate.
My own plan for Nov 11: one standard box per child in our daughter’s class, handed over on the day, one giant box for my wife, and nothing for the office. I will not be citing any sales percentage at the dinner table either, because I still cannot tell which of the four is right.
#PeperoDay #PeperoDay2026 #November11 #KoreanHolidays #GaraetteokDay #FarmersDayKorea #LottePepero #KoreanSnacks #LivingInKorea #KoreanFoodCulture