Chef Esther Choi has spent much of her career introducing people to Korean food on her own terms.
Through restaurants, television, frozen meals, and now Sessy, the chef and entrepreneur has found different ways to bring Korean flavors into people’s lives. Sessy is a Korean-American pantry brand built around staples like gochujang, soy sauce, and sesame oil. With Sessy, Choi is handing over more of the control. Instead of serving a finished dish, she’s giving home cooks the ingredients to make something of their own.
The idea is deeply personal. Growing up in South Jersey, Choi remembers these ingredients being completely ordinary at home, even when the world outside treated them as unfamiliar or “ethnic.” Today, as Korean food has become increasingly mainstream in the U.S., she wants people to experiment with those flavors while still understanding the history, technique, and culture behind them.
We spoke with Choi about building Sessy, growing up Korean American, watching gochujang go mainstream, and what it would mean for the brand to become part of someone’s everyday cooking.
K-Snax: You’ve shared Korean food through restaurants, television, frozen products, and now pantry staples. What excited you most about building a brand that’s focused on ingredients people use in their own cooking, rather than giving them a finished version of a dish?
Choi: With a restaurant, or even a frozen product, I’m making the decisions for you—I’m plating the dish, I’m seasoning it exactly how I want it. With Sessy, I’m handing you the building blocks and trusting you to make it yours. If I give you a jar of gochujang, that’s going into your fridge, your weeknight dinners, your spontaneous Tuesday noodle dish, it becomes part of your cooking, not just something you ordered from me once. That felt like the most exciting evolution. Instead of introducing people to Korean food one dish at a time, I’m giving them the foundations to cook it themselves.
K-Snax: Sessy describes itself as a Korean-American pantry brand. How did your own experience growing up between cultures shape the way you approached ingredients like soy sauce, gochujang, and sesame oil?
Choi: I grew up in a small town in South Jersey where I was often the only Korean kid around, but at home, with my grandmother, these ingredients weren’t “ethnic” or exotic, they were just what was in the fridge. Soy sauce, sesame oil, and gochujang were as normal to me as ketchup was to my classmates. That gap between how the world saw those ingredients and how normal they were in my house is really the whole DNA of Sessy. I’m not introducing anyone to something foreign, I’m just presenting these staples the way I always experienced them: essential, everyday, and very fun to cook with, not precious or intimidating.
K-Snax: Korean food occupies a very different place in American culture today than it did when you began your career. As ingredients like gochujang become increasingly mainstream, what do you think we gain from that popularity, and what are you conscious of making sure doesn’t get lost?
Choi: At the beginning of my career, I wanted to bring Korean food to the national culinary dialogue. I’m grateful to have seen a huge shift in the American palate, where gochujang is now showing up on menus that have nothing to do with Korean food at all, and honestly, I love that. It means people are empowered enough to cook and experiment with our flavors. What I’m careful about is making sure it doesn’t get flattened into just “spicy red sauce” without any context for what it actually is, or how much technique and time go into something like a beautifully fermented traditional gochujang. Popularity is great. I just want people to fall in love with the ingredient and understand it’s coming from somewhere real.
K-Snax: You grew up with ingredients like soy sauce, sesame oil, and gochujang as part of everyday life. When you started building Sessy, did it make you rethink things that you had always understood instinctively about Korean food?
Choi: Definitely. When something is instinct, you don’t actually think about why you do it a certain way – you just do it because that’s how your grandmother did it. Building Sessy forced me to slow down and actually articulate things I’d never had to explain before: why the ratio matters, why the quality of the sesame oil changes everything, why gochujang isn’t just “Korean hot sauce.” This process taught me how to translate instinct into something a home cook who didn’t grow up the way I did could actually use.
K-Snax: Beyond sales or distribution, what would make you feel like Sessy was connecting with people in the way you hoped?
Choi: Hmm, honestly, I think it’s someone messaging me a photo of their fridge with a half-used jar of Sessy gochujang sitting next to their ranch and their sriracha, like it just belongs there. That’s the dream. Not people treating it like a special-occasion Korean ingredient they pull out once, but something they reach for without thinking, the same way I did growing up. If Sessy becomes a normal, unremarkable part of how people cook on a random Tuesday, that’s when I’ll know it actually did what I set out to do.
Follow Sessy:
Follow Esther Choi:
Leave a Reply